And learning wisdom is how we come to be something more than an evolved hominid species. — Wayfarer

Yep. Romanticism in a nutshell. Society and brute nature holds us back. If only we could tread the transhuman path, we could all turn into happy angels living in eternal bliss and harmony.

You seem to reading what I say through the lens of your own definitions. Wisdom for me does not consist in following rules but in having creative insight into uniqjely particular situations in different contexts. — Janus

Where for a minute did I say it was rule-following?

Talk about reading things through your own lens here. Rules or laws reflect a mechanical belief in deterministic absolutes. Procedures to be followed that then make every exception an unwanted accident.

So I said wisdom - understood organically as generality, constraint, habit, etc - is very different on that score. That was my whole bleeding pitch.

And further, I make the distinction to cleverness. That speaks to the actual phenomenology in doing justice to the actual psychological mechanisms.

You are confusing two things - even if the two things go together in a functionally integrated fashion.

So of course we would want to be wise and clever. We want to have a foundation of sound habit or knowledge from which we then can innovate and create in particular ways to suit particular contexts.

But the way we achieve that in practice is a brain that is organised by that very dichotomy. It is organised into the two general systems of a wise habit-level foundation and a clever attention-based innovative capacity.

So yes, you could now define wisdom as creative insight applied in uniquely particular situations. But who else is defining wisdom that way? Not Psychology Today for a start. Yet who would deny that was a good definition of cleverness? Do you?

You will like this clip. It features several philosophers making exactly this point — Wayfarer

Yep. But note the big difference also. This is the Romantic version of the psychology where becoming skilled is an expression of your truest self. And I take the pragmatic social constructionist approach which says becoming skilled is how a selfhood gets forged.

We would stand on opposite sides of the issue in this regard. (Although I wouldn't seek to deny some kind of genetic or biological nature - like the extrovert vs the introvert - that would run deeper than the social construction of that self.)

So the psychological facts are the same. This film would talk up the same phenomenology. The structure of our self is down to the structure of our skills. We exist in definite individuated fashion because we have developed various forms of mastery.

But against the Romantic model, I would say the self is not another transcendent pre-formed entity - a primal thing seeking its rightful forms of expression. Instead, selfhood itself is the immanent product of that development of mastery. Learning skills and habits is how we come to be created as something more than the initial dumb blob of cells.

In the beginning there is certainly always potential. But it is vague and undifferentiated, not the further thing of a preformed state of being.

No one eats "food in general", we eat particular items. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you are hoping to evade my point. If your need is food and you haven't got the option of being particular, then any item will do just as well.

the person who has the general feeling of hunger must progress to choosing a particular item to eat, and therefore the desire for that particular item. — Metaphysician Undercover

It isn't necessary at all. But we may then supply further reasons - further finalities - that might make those particular choices count. Like sell-by dates or habitual preferences.

desire and want start in the general. — Metaphysician Undercover

In the general what?

How is a choice of the particular thing of the ham sandwich, given the variety of options in your fridge, a necessary expression of your general desire of your feeling hungry and so wanting an answer to that in the form of food?

Constraints/habits simply point to the top-down hierarchical structure of these things. Which - if you are Aristotelian - you will immediately recognise as his central metaphysical point. Food is the genus, ham sandwich is the species. And for the particular to relate to the general, it has to be either by virtue of accident or by necessity.

If by necessity, constraints will be in play to ensure that. If by accident, then any particular is merely a material contingency and not a formal need.

So while you are quick to point out that Aristotle was concerned with true spontaneity or accident - the rock that for no reason falls off the cliff - you seem to forget that fact just as fast.

Perhaps you should make it basic to your metaphysics like others who have followed more truly in Aristotle's footsteps have managed to do.

This can be inverted as knowing what particularities to pay attention to. And it's not as though we run through all the generalities saying "Not this, not this...".

But of course, this shows again that you are taking the mediated evolutionary perspective whereas I am taking the phenomenological view of immediate experience. — Janus

But here you are talking about cleverness rather than wisdom - so attentional-level processing and hence phenomenology, rather than habit which has its own particular phenomenology.

So we need to note sharply when we are struck by an unpredicted surprise or the eventual occurrence of some salient event. At some point, our state of happy habit gets hit by an accident that actually matters.

And now cleverness kicks into gear. We have to experiment or figure it out. We must take risks to try something new.

It is because we have that state of generally well-adapted habit that we can so accurately pick out exactly when something novel and cleverness-worthy has happened. We need to turn off any stereotyped response and be prepared to learn and fine-tune.

So you are talking about the phenomenology of cleverness, sure. But have you considered what the phenomenology of wisdom is actually like by contrast?

Why are sages characterised as unshockable and unbothered by all the stuff that everyone else reacts to with unbalanced alarm or delight? What do we really think it is like to be in a wise state of mind?

Of course a wise person can move smoothly to assimilate what looks like the kind of event that would perturb others much more strongly. So they can be clever as befits the occasion.

But phenomenologically, it is the unthinking practiced ease with which they can either ignore or create that is the deep characteristic. They don't have to try hard.

For a Picasso, Federer, or whoever, even useful novelty comes easy as their skills are so sure that mistakes have become really difficult to make. They are in the zone where only the prize needs to be kept in mind. The details take care of themselves.

Probably we are not disagreeing; it might be just a matter of emphasis. — Janus

Business as usual then. :)

For me, wisdom consists in how the 'golden maxims' and "topspin backhands" are creatively used in particular circumstances, so I just don't characterize the habit itself as wisdom. — Janus

For me, what is I am interested in emphasising is this counter-intuitive - because it ain't the usual mechanical way of thinking about it - fact that constraints are creative in this particular way.

A constraint is an optimisation function. It is a generality saying you want to get from A to B in the best way possible - exactly how on any occasion doesn't matter. And to be able to do that, a constraint also has to be able to define what level of goal-missing is tolerable - the detail that doesn't need to be sweated.

So the point is that constraint has this inherent dichotomisation. It allows you to know what generally matters (getting from A to B according to some general standard of what is optimal). And you do that by learning what it is that are the particulars of some actual occasion which are ignorable. A constraint is what separates signal from noise so that goals get achieved within practical tolerances.

So, of course there is no creative freedom without a foundation of diligently acquired habit. Musicians and artists of all kinds exemplify this fact. — Janus

Yeah. The classic creative geniuses are those who have mastered the habits and can then "throw them away" and "free-form it".

Again, my stress is on what the mechanists find surprising about the world - that constraint is what shapes our actually useful freedoms.

We are the product of modern machine culture where the opposite approach must be taken. A machine can only operate reliably if we take away all its creative possibilities.

This was quite literal in the early days. We would take a horse and harness it between a pair of handles attached to a cart with a set of wheels. Add blinkers, whips and reins. Hey presto! Nature constrained to the degree that it reduces any creative possibility to the status of an accident - but an accident of the kind that can't be ignored because it is now a critical problem. If the horse and cart don't function mechanically, some part of the mechanical system has to be fixed before we can get going again.

But I am talking about the causality of autonomous organisms. And now it is about habits or constraints - semiosis - that divide life into signal vs noise. The usefully creative possibilities are what states of constraint develop. And they achieve that by building up a fault-tolerant organisation. The system becomes hierarchically organised so that it can focus on general goals by being able to ignore the messy particulars.

Suppose I have a general feeling of hunger. This feeling, being completely general is not a tendency toward eating any particular food, nor could it be a desire for any particular food. As something "general", it is completely non-physical. However, I may consider physical objects which are available to me to eat, which I have sensed, and I may make a definite goal of making a particular type of sandwich. So the immaterial, and general, feeling of want, which is called "hunger", becomes the desire to eat a very specific, and particular material object, which I am now creating with my hands, the sandwich. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is that how it works? If you are really hungry, you can't afford to be too fussy. Food in general will satisfy your need. But if you have a well-stocked fridge, then already you have constructed a world of forced choice. To make the ham sandwich is not to make the cheese sandwich, the tomato sandwich, the egg sandwich.

Maybe to help you make a sensible decision you would have sought out further criteria. You might have been guided by what was nearest its sell-by date, what was healthiest, what was easiest to throw together, or what left the most of what the rest of the family might like. Or maybe you didn't think much and chose ham out of general habit. Or maybe the choices were so evenly weighted that you might as well have tossed a coin. Your hand went to the first food that caught your eye, accidentally left prominent by the last person to raid the fridge.

But this would not be keeping true to Aristotle's description of the four causes. Formal cause might be understood as constraint, but not final cause. Final cause is the intent, what is wanted, and this causes the person to act in a way accordingly. Final cause is associated with the freedom of the will to choose one's own actions, so constraint is contrary to final cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

You defend a scholastic view of Aristotle. So already we differ strongly. Your argument from authority comes from a secondary source.

And anyway, I am basing my position on modern psychological science. What we call freewill is about constructing these states of mental constraint - to the degree that the accidental actually needs to be ruled out in any of our actions.

So I defend a pragmatist metaphysics, not a theistically absolutist one.

See, you've done the unwise thing and asked another what bullshit and self-hatred are. — Janus

Your definition was oddly specific or personal. But you can see how it relates to the very characteristics I have outlined.

Wisdom would be achieving the goal-achieving generality of knowing what can be tolerated or ignored as meaningless noise. Constraint only needs to suppress material accidents to the degree that they "actually matter" - which in this case is the degree they would actually matter to "you" as the person wanting to know what external bullshit to ignore, and what internal criticism is likewise lacking any real useful meaning.

So when you look up the definition, how do you react to that?

Psychologists tend to agree that wisdom involves an integration of knowledge, experience, and deep understanding that incorporates tolerance for the uncertainties of life as well as its ups and downs. There's an awareness of how things play out over time, and it confers a sense of balance. It can be acquired only through experience, but by itself, experience does not automatically confer wisdom.

Wise people generally share an optimism that life's problems can be solved and experience a certain amount of calm in facing difficult decisions. Intelligence—if only anyone could figure out exactly what it is—may be necessary for wisdom, but it definitely isn't sufficient; an ability to see the big picture, a sense of proportion, and considerable introspection also contribute to its development.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/wisdom

There's some ethical element to it that isn't there with cleverness, intelligence etc. A sense of humility. Some kind of extra weight. — Baden

The ethical aspect would be that wisdom - by my definition here - is characterised by its stability, balance and pragmatism. It contrasts with cleverness in that it seems to have a high tolerance for exceptions. That is part of its generality. It makes it possible to ignore quite a lot as not really mattering (any more).

So our cultural image of the wise person does target natural features of a state of well-developed, well-adapted, habit. Smartness by definition is confrontational, novel and risky. Wisdom is its contrast in being smooth, integrated and fault-tolerant.

The idea is that each situation is uniquely singular, and that wisdom consists in not falling into the habit of treating a situation as a generality: "one of those situations" where "this is what one does". On this reading wisdom involves more creativity than habit. — Janus

But for me, a generality, and thus a habit, is a constraint. A constraint does not dictate some particular path. It supplies the finality, the essential criteria, that define the limits by which freedoms or accidents need to be bounded.

To give an example, hitting a top-spin backhand is a habit, a phronetic generality. It took me quite a few years of practice to master it as a useful skill. So I eventually had a wicked dipping backhand return. I had a habit of constraint that was general - a topspin backhand - but was hardly fixed or rigid. It could be applied over a large range of situations. There was always something specific and singular about each time it was employed. The height of the ball coming at me could have a considerable variety of heights, spins and speeds. And the exact place I needed to hit it to would also change on most occasions.

So a physical habit has exactly that character of being a generalised ability to constrain action in a way that minimises the accidental and so maximises the ability to make particular deliberate or creative choices.

And the same would be the case with wisdom as a term for a generalised intellectual state of having developed a set of sound and useful mental habits of thought.

We can take a wise maxim like the golden rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do to you." Like setting up a wise backhand by focusing on the essential constraints - hit the ball high enough to get over the net/with enough spin to hit that strategically optimal bit of the court - the golden rule focuses us on the general thing of a rule of reciprocality in our social relations. And then - creatively, particularly - we can apply that general rule in ways that best befit any of life's highly variable situations.

So wisdom/habit/generality/constraint all have this causal character. They are not rigid and mechanical - except when we make the mistake of thinking they ought to be this way. In nature, for organisms, habits have a suitably loose fit. They focus on what are the generally desirable outcomes across a range of occasions. And then our actions become organised within that envelope of the desirable so that goals are achieved - again, within a tolerance of error that is generally wise or acceptable. We don't have to mechanically/rigidly sweat the detail if our goals are being achieved well enough.

So the argument you are making is against a rigid/mechanical/reflexive notion of habit. And yet psychology tells us that habit is not like that at all in reality.

Sure, it is hierarchical. The nervous system starts off with very simple hardwired reflex loops - the spinal cord jerking our hand off the hot stove. And then the brainstem might also develop its Pavlovian conditioned reflexes that are stereotyped.

But as the brain keeps adding extra levels of plasticity, we get to the kind of habit that psychologists (and Peirce) are focused on. We get to the generality of practical skills that are wise because all the painful learning and thinking is now in our past. We are fully equipped with a mastery over an area of skill that allows us to just do stuff, focused only on how our general goals need to be achieved on this or that specific occasion.

We don't need to invent a top-spin backhand or a golden rule anew every day, repeating that cleverness continually. We just seek to apply our developed skill to a world that is always somewhat different on every occasion, and yet we don't need to worry about that. With the unthinking smoothness of habit, we can act in a way that achieves our usual goals with the maximum of efficiency, the minimum of fuss or waste.

Counter-argument to what exactly? Don't keep wasting my time.

You're worshipping evolution as a god. I've seen this attitude in the fundamentalist church; — Noble Dust

Of course. Have another go. Wheel out the habit, the template image of the zealot, the religious crank. Pretend you have assimilated my remarks to that.

You're hilarious. You are doing exactly what I say gets done.

read again. — Noble Dust

Read what? You talked about things encased in resin or folk being oppressed. It didn't add up to a counter-argument, just some angry spluttering noises.

And in that text Socrates was concerned with something other than 'living in a clever and well-adapted fashion', namely, how to maintain equanimity in the face of death. — Wayfarer

So how to act dead before you are dead? Sounds legit.

Next stop on this chain of "wisdom", nihilism, existentialism, pessimism and other varieties of life-denying miserabilism.

As I said, it is a natural cycle. Organisms become well adapted to their worlds by accumulating habits. And that is great until the world changes too abruptly and whacks them for six. That is nature's way. It is how evolution works. Creative destruction. Stop and reset every so often.

Now you could make an argument for humans breaking out of this natural pattern. Wouldn't it be nice if we could forever keep learning, keep expanding, never slowing or senescing.

But even then, we would only wind up knowing everything, having the right answer to every question, and so run out of anything new to discover. That notion of wisdom might be considered a dull fate.

My own argument is in favour of a fruitful balance - one where we are getting wiser in a fashion that allows our cleverness to become ever more sharply focused.

So the template you are reaching for is a polarity. One thing must be made right so that the other can be held to be wrong. And you see that in the first responses of others in this thread.

If one says "wise", the other must say "clever". If one says "habit", the other must say "spontaneous". If one says "pragmatic", the other must say .... something or other.

And so the complementary approach I take - where wisdom and cleverness are the strengths correcting each other's weaknesses - gets completely overlooked in every reaction to what I write.

I don't know if you're wise or not. I haven't seen any wisdom so far, but I'm hopeful that I may see it as we debate. How's that? — Noble Dust

Is that what you call taking things back? :razz:

But anyway, I set out my argument. I'll have to wait until you can identify some specific fault in it.

But that's typical pragmatism, right? Whatever works - whatever is well-adapted. But at the end of the day, the only criterion for that judgement is adaption, survival, getting along. — Wayfarer

What other purposes did you have in mind for wisdom that aren't directly tied to living your life in a generally clever and well-adapted fashion?

Cleverness knows nothing of the human condition. It just knows power. Wisdom doesn't know power; you don't know wisdom. — Noble Dust

So you took what I said and twisted it to make it fit some template you have acquired and now you feel safe? Your habit of thought trumps my clever (because it is original to your way or thinking) analysis?

As I've said, my view is not very original at all. It is in fact the wisest views on neurocognition and evolutionary lifecycles that I've encountered.

But wisdom is something more than effective repetition as it requires the element of judgement. — Wayfarer

Don't you mean an end to judgement? Once you have the answer, then you are wise. If you still need to judge, you at best only have a clever idea and are still seeking the kind of proof that life delivers.

Why diss habit as animalistic? It is actually a profound psychological fact that the mind develops by learning how to be as unthinking as possible in its coping with reality.

Our narrow focus of conscious attention is not a defect of evolutionary design. It is the whole point. The more of reality we can wisely and habitually ignore, the more selectively we will focus on whatever then that is left as significant and requiring our clever attentiveness and creativity.

So I might be making a bit of a joke in this thread. But it is completely in keeping with the neurocognitive facts. Habits are our wisdom - our hard-won right not to have to think in order to already know. And it is that which then, in complementary fashion, paves the way for our cleverness - our ability to home in on what is significant or surprising and in need of actual thought.

Getting old means that we then do have the time to assimilate almost everything about life to unthinking habit. Which is great - until we get caught out by significant changes in the world we need to predict.

This is just a straightforward logical model of how to "compute life". How else could the brain do its job?

But even there, it is assumed that the listener is able to take such advice on board and choose which habits to cultivate, and which to avoid, which is where wisdom really comes into it. — Wayfarer

Sure. There is a meta-level that takes this further. You can develop the habit of not forming habits and so maintaining a need to constantly rediscover solutions.

But that is just part of the story of a balance between stability and plasticity - the neurocognitive story I am telling. And in the end, it would be wisest if it were a habit that is well adjusted to your way of life.

I feel like him calling her a whore, at the end, is a cheap narrative trick to drain all the ambiguity and frustration and moral failings that they both feel... — csalisbury

My reaction too when I read it some time back. Though the "reveal" can be seen as another layer of pose - him re-framing in a way that socially legitimates the events in a fashion that is now neatly the opposite of sweet and loving. But was it any more authentic if selfhood is essentially always inauthentic to the degree it is self-conscious?

I would slip in that I'm enjoying Joseph Heller's Something Happens if you are into honest literary accounts of the terrible things people think but can't actually say.

But the same basic question applies. Is it possible to be authentic when being aware of how we think or feel must carry with it the sharp sense of the "other" which by implication or suggestion is getting suppressed by us?

That is the real deep question. Are we actually hiding part of ourselves? Or does it just feel like that because acting a part always carries with it whatever it is we are then not doing as its automatic contrast?

It is like that standing on the edge of cliffs or high balconies. The fear you may do exactly what you don't want to do - leap - is what can feel overwhelming.

So the question I have is whether we can ever get through to the "truth" of another person, or ourselves. Because however we actually overtly act, there is then whatever is the antithesis of that by default. The issue is then whether that should be read as the hidden authentic desire - something we've repressed from sight because it is the bad "us" - or merely just another way we could have acted and didn't ... because we are essentially all right as a person ... as a habit of our social conditioning.

Cat Person might strike a chord with its Millennial heightened form - the newer games made possible by online identity. But again, read Heller if you haven't. Very little seems to have changed on that score.

Well, the social dynamics are the same. And I would say the interesting bit is how we understand personal identity.

Anthropology would say that living behind a social mask is far more natural and authentic than the modern Western romantic model of identity would suggest. And also that the erosion of those traditional social categories - like the masculine and feminine - can be troubling if you then expect to find "yourself" in some place beyond all social categories. No such true self can exist.

So the final position I would be arguing for is that we have no sensible choice except to play those available games of social identity as well as we can - for they define where our society is at - while also having a healthy sense of fun about it being a mere (but meaningful) game.

We've got to be able to laugh at our own poses while not being ashamed of the fact that we are also posing.

That works out easily enough in ordinary life, but not so much in the social media world perhaps. Online tends to drive things towards black and white simplicity. Either things are too nice or too nasty. And I think your point was that the male would have been neither as sweet nor as misogynistic as the words suggested. So it was unfair to have the reveal suggest he was ever going to turn out authentically one or the other.

So habit cannot be equated with wisdom; or, in other words, there are both wise and unwise habits. — Janus

But you unwisely, if cleverly, ignore the argument I gave in support of my position.

I said wisdom is habit because it has that same essential character of being unthinkingly general. It does not involve a change of mind. It involves an application of a well-developed (because it has so far worked best) point of view.

And my definition was secured in contrast to cleverness. Cleverness involves novel thinking that has yet to prove it works in a general fashion.

So you need to focus on my actual characterisation of wisdom. Are you offering some different characterisation here? Or any at all?

It seems you are intent merely on conflating cleverness and wisdom as "ways of thought that achieve desirable outcomes" ... that are "wise" ... and probably "clever" too. ;)

So you are hoping to talk past my essential distinction rather than address it.

Where is your evidence that on the whole habit is that which fails to work? How could that even be the case, logically speaking?

So yes, old habits can fail to work - due to a changed world. But by definition, growing old involves finding the habits that best accomodate your reality. We no longer need to think or invent. We can just know.

Wisdom does have its downsides. Just like cleverness.

And why shouldn't that be part of the (dichotomous) definition here? The strengths of the one are the weakness of the other.

This is only "paradoxical" if you insist on wisdom being something absolute and supreme rather than actually relative to the something else from which it develops.

Cleverness is an idea that could work. Wisdom is a habit that does work.

That is why the old are wise. They have had the time to develop robust habits of thought.

It is also why the old eventually break down. They get so well-adapted to a familiar way of life that they lose the capacity to adapt to the crazy new ways of living that clever folk are apt to invent. :)

You cannot have a deterministic system and final cause, they are incompatible. — Metaphysician Undercover

If final cause is understood as constraint, then you have a much simpler story where determinism is just the limits imposed on chance happenings.

Choice and freewill then become more complexly constrained degrees of freedom. So same story, just with more levels of organisation imposed.

I can hold out my hand straight. The hierarchical organisation of my nervous system makes this possible. But I can't control a slight wavering and tremor. The hand is never perfectly still as its position is only being constrained within limits. However I can hold it straight and still enough to the degree that is mostly matters.

The thing to note is that the kind of constraints that are choices are the counterfactually poised ones - the ones where we are regulating a material instability. We can act as if we were logical switches, doing either the one thing or its precise opposite.

So constraint is essentially an organic notion - not a mechanical or deterministic or computational kind of control. But choice is about constraints becoming machine-like - a logical switch - because the system itself is poised on an instability and so an informational or semiotic nudge is all it takes to flip action with counterfactual definiteness in one direction or the other.

This is why there is an irreducible wavering when a hand is held outstretched. The musculoskeletal system is designed on this control principle. Contraction and extension are opposing forces. To maintain the hand in some fixed position means a delicate balancing of those opposed "wills".

Good metaphysics is about describing the world as simply as possible. Final cause needs to be understood first at the physically basic level - as a system of constraints on degrees of freedom. Then the question is how it becomes more like what we mean by human meaningful choice due to hierarchical elaboration.

How does the generalised tendency become a particular function and eventually a counterfactually-definite goal?

The advantage of the semiotic view is that it adds the least metaphysical furniture to the story. It all starts with habits of constraint on degrees of freedom. Then it adds the twist that logic - information - is also "real" here. Latent in the notion of constraint is that it can become maximally definite - as in the choices made by a switch - to the degree that the freedoms in question are themselves maximal!

The two are connected reciprocally. The material aspect of the system - the degrees of freedom - must be as unstable as possible for the constraints, the semiotically-encoded bit, to be as sharply regulatory as possible.

So the story is a little complex - irreducibly triadic in being hierarchical. But it is immanent or self-organising. No need for the unexplained hand of transcendent causality.

Again, I would take the baseline position that mind, life and physics have purpose or finality in this specific deflationary sense - a sequence of distinctions that reflects the underlying levels of semiotic mechanism in play.

So finality is the nested hierarchy of {propensities {functions {purposes}}}. Or to use the jargon, {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

And that reflects broadly physics with its information-constrained tendencies, biology with its genetically-constrained functionalities, and humans with their culturally or linguistically constrained purposes.

The notion of physical telos is the most alien to the usual reductionist way of view causality. But as I say, physics has to smuggle in the notion of generalised tendencies. The second law of thermodynamics especially stands for a universal and irreversible direction for change. Everything must entropify.

And then an informational view of physics - one where holographic event horizons are the "living" context that shape local events - is spelling that out in terms of spatiotemporal structure. You are getting thermal models of time and holographic models of gravity from applying this kind of constraints-based thinking.

Now back to your examples.

1. A towel placed on a spill will "drink" the water, but this is a purely mechanical effect. — Srap Tasmaner

Alarm bells should go off any time your philosophy starts to employ human-made objects as putative examples of natural systems. Chairs, doors, towels and all those kinds of things are artificial and unnatural in exactly the way that a reductionist and mechanical metaphysics describes. They are material objects denuded of any purpose or self-organising form.

And that is because it is us, their users, who want to be in complete control of any form or function that is involved in their existence. They are our instruments and the best instruments are the ones with no minds, no degrees of freedom, of their own. A machine is a system so mechanically constrained that it has no possible choice about what to do. And so does nothing until we inject it with our purposes - like using a towel to mop up a spill.

So yes. The towel acts completely mechanically. That is how we designed it and how we employ it. It is useful to us to the degree it has no use to itself. It is a passive tool of our desires. We get complete choice. The towel could be twisted into a hat or used to flick an arse. And it can't protest that that is outside its proper job description.

So you have picked a good example of an inanimate and unnatural object - one that lacks even the ordinary tendencies of normal physical objects. A river or any other natural feature is doing a job - entropifying. Give a towel a thousand years in a cupboard and it may not even have decayed appreciably. Same with a chair or door. These are machines in that they lack inherent purpose, thus allowing us to supply any purpose they could possibly have.

2. A deer seeks out water periodically because water is of benefit to the deer. Is this intentional, purposeful behavior? — Srap Tasmaner

Of course. The deer has to feel thirsty, remember where the water might be, make decisions about how safe the water hole is.

At a biological function level, there is a reason for systems for maintaining a state of hydration. Then at a mental level, the deer is modelling the world in terms of its physical propensities (the tendency for a waterhole to be in some place) and its organismic purposes (the desires of the hungry wolves that might lurk in the bushes). The full range of telos - from the physical likelihood of boulders rumbling down slopes to out-guessing other minds - is part of the way the deer sees its world.

The mechanical process by which roots take up water is probably not much different from the towel's. — Srap Tasmaner

Except trees grow roots in the direction of the moisture they seek. It is mindful or purposeful behaviour in that they can detect and follow gradients of what they need.

And why do we make towels from cotton? Why is the best insulation wool or duck down? Is there some functionality in the form of the materials that you are overlooking? Do they work "mechanically" because evolution found some kind of optimal solution to a purpose it had?

So a bit of googling finds....

...Cotton is pure cellulose, a naturally occurring polymer. Cellulose is a carbohydrate, and the molecule is a long chain of glucose (sugar) molecules. If you look at the structure of a cellulose molecule you can see the OH groups that are on the outer edge. These negatively charged groups attract water molecules and make cellulose and cotton absorb water well. Cotton can absorb about 25 times its weight in water. Chemists refer to substances like cotton as hydrophilic, which means that they attract water molecules.

The nylon molecule, too, has a great number of places where it can form bonds with water molecules, but not as many places as the cotton molecule. Nylon absorbs water, but not nearly as much as cotton. It only absorbs about 10 percent of its weight in water.

https://home.howstuffworks.com/home-improvement/household-hints-tips/cleaning-organizing/question547.htm

...There are two primary reasons: structure and chemistry. First, the easier-to-explain structure. A cotton fiber is like a tiny tube formed of six different concentric layers (see diagram). As individual cotton fibers grow on the plant, the inside of the “tube” is filled with living cells. Once the fiber matures and the cotton boll opens up to reveal its puffy white contents, these cells dry up and the fiber partially collapses, leaving behind a hollow bean-shaped canal, or “lumen” (see the ultra-magnified image below). This empty space holds lots of water.

Lumens also help provide cotton with its exceptional “wicking” ability, drawing water up along the fibers through capillary action—like sucking on a straw. (Synthetic fibers like nylon are solid, with no internal spaces within the fiber to contain water. Whatever water is absorbed is contained on the fibers’ surfaces.) Lumens also radically increase the surface area of the fiber for water to interact with, which leads to the chemistry part of this.

https://www.outdoors.org/articles/amc-outdoors/why-does-cotton-absorb-so-much-water

So biology has in fact designed a material with just the right qualities we have in mind. And then we turn it into a "spill mopping device" that now exists completely outside the world of nature - the world of evolution and entropification.

3. We drink water much as deer and trees and towels, but we can also choose not to, for any number of reasons. When we do so, we have agency, our action is intentional and purposeful, but it is not our purposefulness that makes water have benefit for us. — Srap Tasmaner

Yet water has benefit to us - to the degree we might be dehydrated. Too much water is not a benefit, but lethal.

So a very elaborate hierarchy of mindfulness has evolved to keep us suitably hydrated. It starts way down at the cellular level as the same problem had to be cracked by single cell life. And the hierarchy of increasingly high level semiotic control has developed to the point that deer can worry about lurking wolves, or we humans can say no - we are thirsty, but for some reason or other (could be fasting or politeness or who knows), we decide not to. There is some other purpose we can think of that delivers some more contextual benefit (whatever that was).

There's nothing like intentional behavior in the water or in the tree, so I don't see any purpose in that sense. — Srap Tasmaner

Well I would say that if a tree has chemoreceptor mechanisms to direct its root growth, then that is pretty purposeful - a lowest state of mind. You could call it functional if you like. But having roots would seem the more general functional imperative. How the roots grow then becomes an expression of that intention. A choice has to be made to serve the purpose and provide an actual benefit to have those roots.

So look close enough at nature and we can see that it does have this general hierarchical story - the very one in which long-term stability becomes the basis for short-run adaptations. A general set of habits must be established that freeze an intentionality in, so that more particular states of intentionality can be formed to achieve more localised benefits.

I think the trouble in this discussion comes from trying to fit the square peg of purpose into the round hole of benefit. — Srap Tasmaner

But why wouldn't there be a direct connection between purpose and benefit? What would a benefit-less purpose even be? What would a benefit be except that it served some purpose?

You said "nature can check every possible option to find the most locally effective choice to actualise". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it is as if that were the case. As if there was a sniffing out of all trajectories.

So the metaphysical challenge would be to understand that as a physically intelligible process. It is not saying that reality has some actual mindlike active choice. It has to be something much more deflationary in practice.

As I replied to Janus, we are only talking about generic propensities or tendencies at the physically simple level here. So we must both do justice to final cause without getting any more spooky about it than makes sense.

And also you said, "my own metaphysics is founded on vagueness, apeiron, quantum foam or firstness.". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. That is the "material" beginning. And finality is the "formal" end. That is how it works.

Clearly, nature checking every possible option is not a limit, it is a thing, nature, acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I use anthropomorphic language here, while also explaining that I use it in a deflationary sense.

So the principle of least action says that nature applies this limiting constraint on all material possibility. And what results is the actuality of a substantial action - some actual trajectory taken by a process or event.

You have to think of this holistically and triadically, not reductionistically and dually.

You cannot produce an ontology from limits, because you need existents. — Metaphysician Undercover

You're not listen as usual. The actual is what emerges as a result of a complementary process of limitation. The existents are what are hylomorphically left after material possibility and formal necessity have had their combined say on the matter.

For example, "God exists", and "God does not exist". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That is addition and subtraction. Simple negation. Dichotomies are a reciprocal or inverse relation. Completely different.

Remember that division is the odd one out in arithmetic because it is a holistic relation, not a compositional one. And so this is like that difference at a logical level.

Either you totally misunderstand, or you intentionally changed the subject, to now talk about a dichotomy. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or you aren't keeping up.

So it is necessary to reject both, neither the principle Nous (God exists) nor the principle Apeiron (God does not exist) is acceptable as a first principle. — Metaphysician Undercover

Who was talking about God here? Not me. That's your bag.

The middles section of the quoted passage, with the reference to Anaximander, seems to be right up your alley, apo! — Janus

That's what led me to the Kyoto School of course. I was googling for references. :grin:

There is speculation about who influenced who as Anaximander was around at the same time as Taoist thought was developing. Anaximander was a coloniser and traveller. So the essential ideas could have gone West to East or the other way. Or developed as obvious for both.

We might see a tendency of things to take paths of least action and enshrine that as a principle. This may give us the impression that nature is purposeful, but the notion of purpose seems to be emptied of its meaning in the absence of deliberation; it seems to become an idea of mere function. — Janus

Or even less than that. It is a mere universal tendency.

So yes, it is a deflationary view. But not an eliminativist one. And that is a significant difference.

Mind is purposeful. Life is functional. Physics speaks to propensities.

Mind, being the most complex or particular, clearly has the most choice to make because it is that which is most individuated from the general or contextual. It can have purposes or choices that set it apart from its circumstances. Indeed, that is kind of definitional.

Life makes choices that are functional. They are choices entrained to environmentally general demands like maintenance and replication.

Physics is then about the truly universal tendencies. And there are now no choices apart from the most general ones already baked into the fabric of being as that which characterise the Cosmos itself.

But still, the least action principle shows that there is something "mysterious" going on in the very heart of reductionist physics. There is a necessary holism that reductionism just cannot explain and simply accepts as a useful simplifying fact.

Newtonian mechanics quickly became recast in the language of Lagrangians and Hamiltonians for practical reasons. The principle of least action made the business of calculating simpler. And then Quantum Mechanics really needed the principle of least action - in the guise of Feynman's path integral - to make calculations of any complexity even humanly possible.

If we accept the overall Western approach (with all its differences; ancient, medieval and modern, of course) as being paradigmatic of philosophy, this would seem to point to the fact that the East has no real philosophical tradition of its own at all. — Janus

It might be instructive to consider the Kyoto School. That was a modern attempt to take a Westernised look back at the Eastern tradition to recover its essential themes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

...it is fair to say that the Kyoto School thinkers generally consider the purest sources for the idea of absolute nothingness to lie in the traditions of the East. Hisamatsu went so far as to speak of absolute nothingness as “oriental nothingness” (Hisamatsu 1960); though it is important to bear in mind that his claim is that this idea was first clearly discovered in the traditions of East. Absolute nothingness is by no means only relevant to Eastern cultures, anymore than in 1500 CE the earth was only round in the West. Moreover, if the idea of absolute nothingness “came to awareness in the spirituality of the East,” as Nishitani says, the philosophy of absolute nothingness is generally considered to be the Kyoto School's own contribution to the contemporary world of thought opened up by the meeting of East and West....

...The Kyoto School might even be thought of as recovering a suggestion from one of the first Presocratic philosophers, Anaximander: namely, to think finite beings as determinations, or delimitations, of “the indefinite” or “the unlimited” (to apeiron)...

...Their explicit references are primarily to Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially to the East Asian Buddhist schools of Zen (predominantly the Rinzai tradition but also notably Dōgen of Sōtō) and/or Pure Land (predominantly Shinran's Shin). The key Sanskrit term in Mahāyāna Buddhism here is śūnyatā (“emptiness”; kū in Japanese). With the noteworthy exception of the later Nishitani, however, the Kyoto School tends to favor the Chinese glyph mu (“nothingness”; wu in Chinese), which is found predominantly in Zen, and which reflects the early attempt to “match terms” with Daoism in the translation and interpretive development of Buddhism in China. Let us briefly examine both of these Asian sources for the Kyoto School's philosophies of absolute nothingness, śūnyatā and wu/mu...

Continuing the discussion with @Wayfarer....

In Mahāyāna Buddhism śūnyatā refers first of all to the fact that all things come into being in “interdependent origination” (Sanskrit: pratītya-samutpāda; Japanese: engi), and they are therefore “empty” of any independent substantial self-nature or “own-being” (Sanskrit: svabhāva). This thought is closely tied to the basic Buddhist thesis of “no-self” or “non-ego” (Sanskrit: anātman; Japanese: muga). All beings, including the ego, are interconnected and in flux.

Psychologically, śūnyatā refers also to the releasement from all attachment to beings, from all reification and willful appropriation of them. Such attachments are both based on and in turn support the primary attachment to the fabricated ego, since the ego both strives to possess and is unwittingly possessed by its reification of beings. Awakening to the emptiness of all things, to their lack of substantial own-being or egoity (Japanese: shogyōmuga), thus frees one both from an ego-centered and reified view of things, and from the illusion of the substantial ego itself.

However, if the movement of negation stops here at a one-sided negation of being (i.e., at negation of the independent substantial reality of things and the ego), and if the idea of “emptiness” is not itself emptied,[8] then we are left either with a pessimistic nihilism or with an ironically reified view of śūnyatā. These are what the Buddhist tradition calls “śūnyatā-sickness” (Japanese: kūbyō).

True śūnyatā must be understood to dynamically negate the very opposition of being and (relative) nothingness (see Nakamura 1975, Vol. 1, 278). Hence, in Mahāyāna we find an explicit return—through a “great negation” of a reified misunderstanding of being—to a “great affirmation” of a non-reified understanding of being. Emptiness thoroughly understood is nothing separate from or opposed to “being” properly understood.

As the often chanted lines of the Heart Sutra put it: “[phenomenal] form is emptiness; emptiness is also [phenomenal] form; emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” (see Bercholz/Kohn 1993, 155). The famous Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher of śūnyatā Nāgārjuna (ca. 150–250 CE) went so far as to provocatively state: “The limits (i.e., realm) of nirvāna are the limits of samsāra. Between the two, also, there is not the slightest difference whatsoever” (Inada 1993, 158). In other words, nirvāna is neither a nihilistic extinction of nor a transcendent escape from the phenomenal world (samsāra); it is rather an enlightened manner of being-in-the-world here and now (see Garfield 1995, 332).

This radical reaffirmation of the phenomenal world was particularly stressed in East Asian developments of Mahāyāna Buddhism, where we find such remarkably affirmative phrases as: “true emptiness, marvelous being” (Japanese: shinkū-myōu).

The conclusion to be drawn, is that both of these, the controlling mind, Nous, and the infinite potential, apeiron, are inherently incompatible. The triadic approach you present, which is an attempt to do the impossible, establish compatibility between the two incompatibles, ought to be dismissed, as the impossible solution. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are talking about two incompatible things. I'm talking about two complementary limits.

A dichotomy is logically that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. So Apeiron and Nous would have to "exist" as the inverse or reciprocal of each other. They would be the mutually opposed limits on being, and hence Being would be that bit - the actual or substantial bit - left in the middle. The limits themselves are not part of what is actual because they are the extremes that mark the limit of what even could be actual. We might give them names, like Apeiron and Nous. But they are the names of the complementary limits on being.

This is why my metaphysical approach is irreducibly triadic or hierarchical. It says actuality is the meat in the sandwich. Two reciprocally-defined bounds define the limits of reality, and so you have everything that is real found in-between those limits.

This is systems thinking - just like Aristotle's four causes and hylomorphic form. The substantial is the bit that exists in-between the limitations of formal causes and material possibilities. The approach I take is the dichotomous/triadic one that actually underwrote Ancient Greek metaphysics and so modern science.

But Aristotelean logic - the three laws of thought - then also had a huge influence on metaphysical argument. While four causes thinking was holistic, the laws of thought (and atomistic philosophy) set the scene for the great reductionist project. Which in turn resulted in theistic dualism.

So here you are trying to assert the authority of the law of the excluded middle. Faced with a dichotomy, you say its complementary pair must be reduced to either/or. One thing or the other. You deny the third thing of the reciprocal relation that creates the separation and so also forms the interaction. You say - with the full force of an unexamined habit - that only a yes/no answer is logically acceptable.

Holism has a metaphysical logic. Reductionism has its own metaphysical logic. If you feel confused by my posts, it is only because you read them through the same distorting lens every time.

Hey, it was you who said it wasn't about stasis, except that it was.

Remember that my own metaphysics is founded on vagueness, apeiron, quantum foam or firstness. So I have a pretty specific conception of a state of being that is "less than nothing" in being "potentially anything".

Except that 'stasis' is not the end towards which Buddhism strives. — Wayfarer

Customarily, Nirvāṇa is said to be inconceivable, but it is sometimes imagined as being stasis or quiescence. — Wayfarer

permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and un-become ... that it is the Good, the supreme goal

Aren't you contradicting yourself now?

Except that 'stasis' is not the end towards which Buddhism strives. — Wayfarer

Oh well. Stillness doesn't have to be dead emptiness. It is the disengagement that resolves the karmic cycle of engagement.

But you are right that there is a tellic trajectory in Buddhism if the letting go is meant to result in nirvana - which you would read as a state of pure mind?

So it depends on how you frame this. Is the end a return to the beginning - if all is spirit and ceasing to strive is to become one again with that spirit? Or is the end a proper transformation - where the material world was the beginning and pure mind is the desire?

So everyone is wrestling with the same metaphysical conundrum. Existence seems to be both a tale of entropy and negentropy, progress and illusion.

There is the growth of complexity out of simplicity - with us sitting at the enlightened peak of that, and presuming that the ladder extends all the way to the pure mind up in heaven.

Then there is also the just as obvious cycle of life and death, birth and destruction. Complexity arises and crumbles. Material simplicity wins.

Both these stories are true of nature. A grand metaphysical narrative has to show how that can be the case in a complementary, rather than a contradictory, fashion.

But, your point is correct, if things ALWAYS strive towards the lowest quantum state possible, and hence the most efficient route, then there seems to be a 'hidden variable' that is the idealism of Platonism at work, no? — Posty McPostface

I agree that Plato was trying to put a finger on the same general idea. Any causal description of nature is going to need some kind of global downward acting purpose to organise its affairs. It can't be all a matter of blind accident with no helping hand.

But Peirce's 'law of love' got pretty short shrift amongst his later scientific interpreters. — Wayfarer

Yep. This is indeed a case where his trichotomania may have led him astray. ;)

My metaphysics is content with accident and necessity - or freedoms and constraints. Creative love is not needed as a further category.

If we want to include an anthropomorphic dimensions to the discussion, that can be done via the contrast of simplicity and complexity. Hierarchy theory can speak to the human aspect without having to bring in transcendental agapism.

So sure, human feeling is fine and wonderful. But it is a side-story to creation, not its final goal. Hierarchies of complexity - like tiny dots of planets coated with a thin biofilm of life and mind - may arise in the middle of the Cosmic tale, like erupting turbulence. But the bigger picture is simpler. The Universe on the whole is just a spread/cooling bath of radiation. Humans are specks of heightened entropification - the socio-economic structure required to combust a trapped store of fossil fuel - that flared and disappeared in the Cosmic blink of an eye. Nothing more.

So agapism fails in that it lacks the immanence which makes evolution by fortuitous variation, and evolution by mechanical necessity, ring true to us natural philosophers.

Peirce makes mistakes, like anyone.

This isn't problematic if one assumes Platonism to be true, no? — Posty McPostface

But how does that Platonism work? Yes, we have the allegory of the cave. But that points to a very unrealistic kind of reality-creating mechanism.

Consider the catenary curve - the form that a sagging chain adopts to satisfy the principle of least action - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary

We can solve its dynamics with an equation that distinguishes between the constants (that stand for an equilibrium condition) and the variables (that are all the accidents that are the different actual arches or suspended chains).

So Plato offered no connecting metaphysics. He imagined a world of static forms that simply cast a shadow that was imperfect in its variability.

What you need is a description that ties matter and form together, having first separated them. And physics does this by being able to define a set of boundary conditions and a set of initial conditions.

So a dynamical or emergent view of existence would say that Platonia is not inhabited by a zoo of particular abstract objects - horses, triangles and spears - but is the home of constraining physical principles. Symmetries and their symmetry breaking possibilities. Then these principles get expressed directly because ... they are constraints. They exist in their very expression.

The following passage from Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer (page 53-54) ... — Janus

...is pretty unreliable. :)

The way I would look at it is that purpose and form are tied together by what, in modern physics, has become enshrined as the principle of least action. So when Nature has a purpose - an intent to be expressed in an action - there is an optimisation where the shortest path is the one chosen.

This is actually a really mysterious fact - or at least it requires spooky nonlocality because it means that nature picks out the most effective path having considered absolutely every available possibility.

So folk like Aristotle, Plato and Peirce looked at nature and could see something like this at work. Causation involves the holistic settling on some generalised optimal balance.

Plato made finality part of his world of forms. The idea of the good was the light that illuminated all the more particular forms. So goodness - as another way of getting at optimality, balance, effectiveness - was the ultimate purpose of existence. That was the telos.

Aristotle then made the distinction between final and formal cause more explicit. Finality spoke to generality - pure purpose, but now in all its manifest variety - while form became the explicitly particular - and now included the accidents of substance. Instead of one goal, goal-centredness became a thing. And formal cause became - in my view - over-identified with whatever the heck shape something wound up taking.

The idea of necessary form (that which serves the purpose) and accidental form (that which is only purposeful in the sense it doesn't actively prevent the said purpose being achieved) got confused.

Peirce then did take a fully constraints-based/hierarchical view of causation and so had a sufficiently complex model of reality to separate the necessary from the accidental (when it comes to the third thing of the actual).

And then while he stressed "irreversibilty" - a tellic trend in nature - it wasn't about the universal growth of accidents or randomness, but the exact opposite. The purpose of the Cosmos was the universal growth of reasonableness or orderly intelligibility. It was the growth of habits - the constraints that suppress randomness and chaos.

So there are differences and similarities. I prefer to focus on the similarities. What all these guys saw was that there is some kind of holism going on, some kind of downward acting oversight, which causes the Cosmos, the physical world, to be organised by a global optimising principle. The forms that matter take are intelligible because nature can check every possible option to find the most locally effective choice to actualise.

Now this is unmysterious when we think about it as evolution or development. It seems every possibility is being actualised and then either promoted or erased. We can see the optimisation in action.

But current physics - not yet having that kind of "four causes" holism when it comes to picture of reality - is still stuck with a rather hand-waving story on how nature actually implements its least action principle in practice.

With quantum theory for instance, we know that a path integral or sum over histories formalism works. The calculations are correct to umpteen decimal places. But how nature knows to try every path and actualise only the most optimal path (on average - this is a probabilistic story with quantum physics) is the weird and non-local hole in the theory as yet.

Final cause is traditionally understood to be synonymous with final purpose. How can we relate the ideas of "randomness" and "irreversibility" to the idea of 'purpose'? — Janus

Again, purpose does align with irreversibility. It says things are heading towards some end because they are moving away from some beginning. And right from the beginning, they were already headed in that direction.

But Peirce definitely didn't think randomness was the final desire. It was instead the chaotic beginning that reasonableness would leave behind by imposing its logical habits of order.

And even the Heat Death of the Universe can be understood as a state of maximal order, minimal chaos. (Entropy counting is a trickier concept than folk usually realise here.)

The Eastern idea of Karma is often explained as the idea of "cause and effect". Can the idea of Karma be related to the idea of the four causes? — Janus

I think it is related but different.

Eastern philosophy stresses equilibrium balance. So it is a picture of fluctuations or striving settling back towards stillness.

And again this is quite a naturalistic picture. You find it in the organicism of Anaximander or Heraclitus. The only surviving fragment of actual writing from Anaximander is a rather enigmatic comment about cosmic injustices becoming balanced.

So he had a developmental model of the Cosmos - the creation of worlds by the separation of the pure potential of the Apeiron into the hot and the cold, thence the dry and the moist. But this was a Karmic model also in that there was nothing standing in the way of all the separated apeiron simply folding back into itself and returning to its initial untroubled state. Disturbances might erupt - like turbulence in a stream - and then just as easily vanish.

This was also the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising. It is the reason for a cyclic view. Stuff can bubble up and organise to have complex form. But that kind of symmetry-breaking seems perfectly reversible. There is no reason it should persist, except by accident, or because we falsely try to maintain it.

So you have two contrasting metaphysics - even though both are broadly organic and holistic.

And I, of course, find the fact that there is this dichotomy of choices only what one would expect. The actual whole story is triadic. So the equilibrium story, and the tellic story, are like the synchronic and diachronic views of the one metaphysics.

This indeed fits very nicely with the Big Bang/Heat Death cosmology of modern physics. As I mentioned about counting entropy, a problem is that from one point of view, the total entropy of the universe has never changed. It may have cooled, yet it has also expanded. So one thing has been exchanged for another, without changing the sum total.

So from a cross-sectional perspective, the universe is always in thermal equilibrium (if we forget the tiny fraction that is negentropic matter for the moment). But from a longitudinal perspective, the universe is transforming from a chaotic fluctuating beginning to a big silent nothingness of minimal fluctuation.

To sum up, the ancients did look at nature and did see a holistic story. But it gets confusing as there is then a tendency to latch onto one or other of a pair of dichotomous alternatives. Either existence is basically eternal and unchanging - so any eruptions of busy striving will be something temporary, and bound to get cancelled out. Or it is basically striving and transformative - and so there is some actual one-way journey that starts in chaos and winds up in some kind of intelligible perfection (like our good selves even :) ).

Peirce is the modern metaphysician who finally set out a larger framework - a tradic or hierarchical one - that could incorporate these two alternatives. It could be both a story of holistic equilibrium and a story of a natural growth of purposeful form.

But that kind of ninja metaphysics is hard to wrap your thinking around. Hoffmeyer and his fellow Euro-semioticians are a fine bunch, but they come at semiotics from a broadly linguistic angle. What is central to them is the code duality - the symbol~matter aspect of the story.

The biosemioticians who best understood Peirce - in my view - were those in the US who were the pioneers in applying hierarchy theory to biological science. They were looking at things structurally. So they could recognise straight away how semiotics mapped to that kind of triadic complexity - the kind which is built of pairs of dichotomies, the kind that has both a cross-sectional metaphysics and also an "exactly opposite" longitudinal one.

Zero-squared is still zero, experimental imprecisions aside. — Andrew M

Well, Pierre-Normand was talking about almost zero amplitudes. But that is all part of the fudging when it comes to calculating using infinities. It is part of the same can of worms.

It doesn't have to be that way. You can reject actual infinities and consider limits such as Planck-length and light-speed to constrain the locations a particle can be in since it was last measured. As Max Tegmark, who advocates MWI, says: — Andrew M

There you go! That's what I am talking about - accepting actual cut-offs in principled fashion. I find it encouraging that Tegmark is blogging in a way that sounds like confessing his sins. :)