The effect from the manifold 'spitting' of observers over time ought not to be anymore troublesome to a compatibilist conception of free will than is the fact that, within any determinate history of a single observer, there are unlikely events that occasionally occur as the outcome of the uncontrolled amplification of quantum fluctuations. This is not sufficient to remove the agent's control where it matters, except in very restricted and artificial situations, since not all features of the emergent classical domain are subject to such uncontrollable fluctuations. — Pierre-Normand

This is where we - SX included - agree. Just on the physics of brains alone, quantumness doesn't come into it as there is no evidence to suggest that consciousness depends on some kind of clever amplification of fluctuations. Instead, the brain would appear to rely on a routine thermal suppression of those fluctuations.

Furthermore, I argued on the grounds of biosemiotics or standard biological theory that life and mind are further insulated from physics in toto to the degree they are informational processes. So quantum or classical - it doesn't make a difference to the degree that brains are processing signs, doing some kind of neural computation, and so cognition would be a multi-realisable function. The algorithms could be implemented in any kind of hardware in principle.

Having stated that general case, then come the critical caveats. An enactive or biosemiotic view of cognition does argue that brains aren't actually computers. Symbol and matter, software and hardware, are entangled in a structural relationship tide to the embodied purposes of Darwinian flourishing, and more generally, entropy gradient dissipation.

And then still more crucially, biophysics reveals that the actual physical basis of life and mind is the nanoscale quasi-classical realm where the quantum and the classical phases of existence are in a poised state of critical instability. Organic chemistry in room temperature water has some very special properties that do explain how life and mind - as semiotic structures - could even exist.

So a little ironically, it is not about either the classical or the quantum realm. Consciousness, as what brains do, has its roots in the existence of a quasi-classical transition zone where the physics still swings both ways.

Does that make freewill now a quasi-classical phenomenon? Well no. As I argued earlier, freewill is a much higher level socially constructed deal. It is about the construction of a "thinking self" that negotiates between a set of established cultural norms around behaviour, and some set of needs and feelings that represent "our selves" as a biological and psychological individual within that wider framework.

Freewill is a contra-causal thing because that is just a basic logical requirement. It needs to be based in counterfactual thinking to allow the needs of society vs the needs of the individual to even get negotiated and arrive at some pragmatic balance.

So what we end up with here is a thread of semiotics - a balance of integration and differentiation - that starts right down in maximal simplicity of the quantum mechanics and continues with ever greater elaboration all the way up to the massive complexity of humans living as social creatures.

There are the disjunctions that separate, but then also the relations that still connect.

And a constraints-based metaphyics accounts for that. It finds its foundations not in some ground - whatever it is that sits at the level immediately below the level in question - but in the fact that there is some boundary between two levels ... a boundary with the third thing of a bridging relation.

So it is the irreducibly triadic relation which is the grounding thing.

Which is also why a quantum interpretation that focuses on the observer rather than the observables, the complex epistemic relation rather than the simple ontic facts or events, would be the way forward.

So for you the "shut up and calculate" approach of some of those who support CI is no longer an option under these new "Bayseian" interpretations? — jkg20

Huh? Of course an epistemic instrumentalism is always a sound default position here. So I'm fine if that suits people's needs. But I personally am interested in the metaphysical story. Which should be OK too - especially given that this is a philosophy forum.

It starts with the pedaling, and may stop with the brakes at any moment, and the direction changes with the steering. — Metaphysician Undercover

So all this stopping, starting and changing. Doesn’t it seem contradictory of you to assert that the forward motion represents the instability here when that instability is what you are imposing on its ... stability.

What would be the story if you weren’t so constantly busy stopping, starting and changing?

Perhaps my reading is even more superficial than the article, but it seems to me that the new probabilistic approach being sketched in the article is just a vamped-up epistemology of QM, not a radically new metaphysical interpretation. — jkg20

Yeah. Some say it is going back to CI. But for me, that is ontic in that it puts the observer - or at least, points of view - in the spotlight as the critical factor.

So - as in Wheeler's participatory universe - the observer constructs the constraints that shape the probability spaces or wavefunctions. But this can't be human observers, so it must be some generic notion of an observer as the informational limits to constraint itself.

The telling idea is that when it gets down to it, two opposing questions can't be asked of the same event simultaneously. Constraining the uncertainty regarding one of the variables results reciprocally in the loss of constraint on its complementary partner.

So because "asking questions" = "constraining indeterminacy", the quantum information approach does suggest an ontology of an observer-created reality. Or to be Peircean, a pan-semiotic metaphysics.

Bottom-up metaphysics starts with concrete events and then the weirdness starts when bare possibilities themselves become the concrete events. Everything that is possible also exists - leading to the need for the many worlds in which that concretely is the case.

But I am talking about a top-down metaphysics where nothing is ever at base completely concrete, only relatively constrained in its indeterminacy. And quantum mechanics arises out of the impossibility of constraining states of affairs to the degree that two opposing questions can be answered with limit state accuracy in the same act of measurement.

So the weirdness arises out of the limits that exist for top-down constraint - the quite logical limits - and not on assumptions about the concrete nature of bottom-up possibilities, which in turn require as many worlds as there are countable possibilities.

But we've already discussed your odd fetish for definitions.

You think?

Are neurons evolved to exchange signals or potentials?

Let’s stop mucking about.

Decoherence theories seek to solve this privileged basis problem by means of an appeal to the interactions with the environment but run into other problems while attempting to factor out the quantum mechanical descriptions of the composite 'system + observer + environment' in a principled way. — Pierre-Normand

Quite. I am all for decoherence as the right general idea. It ties it all back to an emergent thermodynamical evolution in time.

But you can't hide the basic metaphysical issue in an infinite splitting of the universe into tinier thermal compartments any more than by splitting whole worlds ... into infinite "world-lines".

At some point you have to stop deferring the imposition of some limit, some cut-off. And once you accept that, you may as well turn around and start with the very thing of limits - ie: constraints - as your metaphysical primitives.

If we don't reify the many-worlds as metaphysically real entities... — Pierre-Normand

...then we might as well stick to Copenhagen minimalism.

I think the historical issue here is that MWI has piggy-backed on the legitimacy of decoherence as a formal extension to quantum theory. The maths of QM got glued to the maths of statistical mechanics and a better model has resulted.

But at the level of interpretation, MWI has smuggled itself in on the back of this. And for no special reason. Decoherence doesn't demand anything more than the epistemology of CI. And if your interest is in ontology, then MWI remains an extravagance and decoherence is essentially about thermal constraints on quantum indeterminism. We can now ask why coarse-graining would work.

The main trouble with such interpretations, on my view, isn't so much the difficulty in accounting for the empirical verification of the probabilities derived from the Born rule so much as the ad hoc character of the definition of 'observers'... — Pierre-Normand

Yep. And so decoherence turns the environment into a generalised observer. Hierarchy theory can be applied to account for the effects of spatiotemporal scale. Simply put, at sufficient distance, any fluctuating process turns into a solid-looking blur. The quantum looks like the classical.

So I object to MWI because it is business as usual for bottom-up constructive notions of ontology.

Something has to put a lid on quantumness. We know the difference between the quantum, quasi-classical and classical states of being. It gets silly to pretend there is no kind of wavefunction collapse, even if it is an emergent decoherent illusion - what things look like at a distance - on the microscale.

Given we have to accept constraints or limits and can't keep hiding the fact in inaccessible places, like an infinity of worlds or an infinity of thermal scales, then we might as well do the flip of treating constraints as ontically primitive. And that is how I understand the emerging quantum information approach - the reconstruction of QM that starts by ontologising probabilty rather than trying to defuse it via the unlimited worlds of modal realism.

If she sets up Young's double-slit experiment, for instance, she can ensure that a photon (almost) never will strike the vicinity of a region of zero-amplitude on the receiving screen even though she will not control which one of the several bands with large amplitude the photon will strike. — Pierre-Normand

And yet infinitely often, the zero-amplitude strikes will also happen in some worldline of the observer. Which screws any claim to have done something which has constrained the probabilities to these observed bands.

Under MWI, there will be infinitely many worlds in which all the bands are composed of the least likely events. So the bands will be exactly where they shouldn't be for an infinity of observers.

If you take MWI seriously, you can't take the probabilistic success of QM seriously. Everything that can happen, happens infinitely often.

That's why you can't take MWI seriously.

This would be a good starting point - https://www.nature.com/news/physics-quantum-quest-1.13711

This was a paper I particularly liked - http://iopscience.iop.org/1751-8121/47/42/424009/article

And here is a pop account that takes things further to include GR - https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-solve-the-biggest-mystery-in-physics-join-two-kinds-of-law-20170907/

For balance, these are other approaches that I didn't like so much -

https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-theory-rebuilt-from-simple-physical-principles-20170830/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-bayesianism-explained-by-its-founder-20150604/

And for the historic view, Wheeler's it from bit is still great - http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

Is the motion constant and long-run in terms of its direction or not? Make up your mind. Either the bicycle is going forward or it ain't. Simple logic.

These can be mechanistically analyzed using newtonian mechanics no? — aporiap

No.

Well you can analyse them that way and discover nothing about what makes them tick.

But if you are a neuroscientist, you might hope to decode what the patterns of activation mean by the way they correlate with observable behaviour. Which is analysing them semiotically.

It is just the same as understanding some ancient writing system. Knowing everything there could be to know about how the marks came to be impressed on a clay tablet or scratched on a rock will tell you zero about what the marks meant to their makers. The physics of marks isn't the semantics of marks.

Ultimately we can say decision-making is mediated by neuronal population interactions, which are governed by laws of classical mechanics + some derivative chemical laws. — aporiap

Hell no. Even the most reductionist of neuroscientists believes that you would need some kind of laws of information processing.

As a machinery, populations of neurons may be ruled by some kind of standard syntax. And you might even use physical analogies as the inspiration for the kind of syntax that could work - like the "simulated annealing" popular as the kind of algorithmic constraint used in neural network modelling.

But Newtonian mechanics has zip to do with it. The whole bleeding point of information processing systems is that those kinds of physical constraints don't have anything to do with it. You can't run a computer program on hardware that is flipping all its gates for merely physical reasons, like they are feeling too hot or too cold. Information processing works only to the degree the vagaries of the real world material processes have been shut out.

So it is the other way round. For information processing to be predictable and deterministic, it must have the material world completely controlled.

There is no "long run" for an organism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here we go....

To stay upright on a bike requires forward motion, pedaling, and this is a form of instability, not stability. — Metaphysician Undercover

What a horrendous self-contradiction. You claim that to be moving forward steadily is unstable? Next thing you will be claiming Newton was wrong about inertia!

There is no such thing as an organism's "long term central balance", that's a fiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

...and on we trundle....

If you want to do your biology in this contradictory way, then I think that is your problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great. As ever, I am happy to be in contradiction to your arse-backwards thinking.

Right, that's why homeostasis, and its assumed goal of "stability" is an inappropriate description of living systems. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, you have to be generally able to centre if you want to be able to go off-centre for particular reasons.

To ride a bike, you need to be able to balance upright so that you can also maintain your balance by leaning over on corners.

Why do you find it so difficult to agree with me, even when you are saying the same thing anyway? — Metaphysician Undercover

You know why. You take whatever I say and say it backwards.

Theories of homeostasis dictate that living systems have the goal of setting up stable equilibriums, that's how the living system is described, as a stable equilibrium. But what you have just said is completely opposed to this idea, the living systems are setting up unstable material conditions, not stable conditions. — Metaphysician Undercover

What don't you get about the difference between the general and the particular?

An organism must be able to both persist and to adapt. In the long run, it must be stably centred or balanced - hence homeostasis. In the short run, it must be able to adjust that general balance in locally useful ways.

The child first learns to stay upright on a bike. Then it learns to lean into corners.

Actually this is more an issue with novice motorcyclists or pillion passengers. It takes some persuading for newbies to let their bodies "fall over" with the bike rather than keep nicely upright on a sharp bend.

So what you miss here is that the "contradiction" is the point. As usual, we are talking about the symmetry-breaking logic of a dichotomy. You need contrasting limits to allow for the further thing of hierarchical organisation.

An organism has autonomy because it can make an active distinction between its long-term central balance and its moment-to-moment fine adjustments.

It is not my problem if your understand of biological terminology insists on a more inflexible reading - one that is either/or rather than and/both.

But I think the many worlds stuff renews it though. — JupiterJess

Yeah sure. There are many interpretations that try to recover that lost determinism. You can go that route too. In the end, you can hide what you can't find out of sight, either as hidden local variables, or hidden entire worlds.

So in desperation, you might believe absolutely anything to preserve your faith in the rule of physical determinism.

Yet a constraints-based physicalism already explains the world better.

And QM is moving towards that kind of interpretation with the quantum information or quantum reconstruction projects. MWI and Bohmian Mechanics are the last gasp of an out-dated way of conceiving of physicalism. Their advocates are especially passionate probably because they know they are a passing story. :)

So, can it be affirmatively asserted that QM affirms the concept of having a 'free will'? — Posty McPostface

The freewill problem arose out of the discovery of Newtonian determinism and its LaPlacean implications. So quantum indeterminism definitely challenges the Newtonian/LaPlacean paradigm that gave the freewill debate all its sociological charge.

Noting of course that it was essentially a theistic issue anyway, as mind or spirit - representing organismic notions of autonomy or agency - were being opposed to science's mechanistic view of nature.

But anyway. QM demonstrates that nature is essentially spontaneous. However it also demonstrates that this spontaneity is subject to constraints. Randomness or unpredictability always occurs in a context that is imposing some degree of limitation.

So the deeper message of QM is not that nature is random and therefore nakedly free. It is that nature is the result of persisting constraints on such randomness. Thus if we are modelling something human like freewill, we should understand it in the same fashion - as the suppression of the unpredictable to the degree that it matters.

In that light, it becomes natural that individual human choices occur in socially and environmentally pragmatic contexts. It takes those contexts for individual action to have a definite meaning, and not merely be random and meaningless.

Now as a matter of freewill, you could choose not to wear matching socks. That might serve some sartorial purpose - one that means something, sends a definite signal to your social context. Or you might arrive at the same position by simply getting dressed in the dark and not checking. And that kind of sloppiness might also signal something to your social context.

So freewill is a term that targets the kind of action which is thoughtful and purposeful as a considered response within the constraints of some larger social or environmental context. It says being an "individual" is about having enough autonomy to go with the flow, or go against the flow. But that counterfactuality is itself wholly dependent on some understanding of context.

If you wear unmatched socks deliberately, you seek to signal your allegiance to some higher sartorial purpose. You definitely don't want to be mistaken for an actual, dress in the dark, rando. You most probably want to be granted the status of being such an autonomous being that you don't need to care that you might look like a rando. A complex game of social double bluff.

[This example sticks in my mind because David Chalmers chose to wear one red sock, one blue sock, when he gave his first big audience talk on the explanatory gap/quantum consciousness schtick. And he is one socially crafty dude.]

Moreover, human free choice would not be made possible by neuronal randomness in any case (and all the evidence so far seems to be against it) because no conscious human choice could ever operate to refashion neural networks directly at the neuronal level. Neural networks change through experience, not through will. — Heidi Ravven

This is still seeking some kind of mechanistic account - the "experiential" weighting of syntaptic connects that determine an output state.

Neural patterns need to seen as representing constraining contexts. They represent the information that limits the otherwise spastic operation of the body's many degrees of freedom.

This constraints-based approach to autonomy is what neuroscience finds when it studies the development of skilled action.

A beginner at a sport sends a confusion of control messages to their muscles. The result is a jerky and poorly timed action as the beginner winds up trying to push and pull at the same time. Skilled athletes have very quiet muscles when recorded with EEG. They are maximally efficient in limiting the spasticity or randomness in what their body would otherwise do.

It is the same kind of story when recording the brains of babies as they learn to make perceptual sense of their world. It is all about learning meaningful neural constraint. At first, a neuron in the visual pathway will fire wildly in response to pretty much anything. But quickly it learns to limit its firing to some very precise kind of stimulus - like a line slanted at some particular angle. It learns to shut up the rest of the time.

So brains - as neural networks - arrive at specific behavioural choices by evolving meaningful states of constraint.

You as an individual could be doing anything at any particular moment - and what that would look like is the chaos of an epileptic fit. Luckily neural networks do learn from experience. They form useful interpretive habits. They form contexts that constrain the chaos to a pragmatic minimum.

Randomness may still lurk. In nature, spontaneity is irreducible - as QM proves. But agency is about being able to suppress degrees of freedom to the point where any remaining variety is not a problem for the achieving of a goal. The irreducible spontaneity - the remaining quiver in the dart thrower's hand - is still suppressed enough that the goals are met. The bullseye gets hit often enough.

I generally agree with your analysis, but the issue that I have is with the idea that mind is the output or consequence of fundamentally physical processes — Wayfarer

But aren’t I saying the process is fundamentally informational, as well? And that the source of the stably persisting identity of a mindful, purposeful, organism is to be found nowhere in the matter of which it is composed?

So this is a dualism without the causal problems. This is a dualism where the complementary nature of stabilising ideas and labile hardware gets rid of the usual “dead matter” descriptions of life and mind.

The mainstream neo-darwinian view is that life began in the apocryphal 'warm pond' by some as-yet undetermined process involving some combination of heat, pressure, and complex chemistry — Wayfarer

That is old hat now. The other really good new popularisation is Nick Lane’s The Vital Question which shows how life must have started around some active chemical flow. Luke warm alkaline ocean vents are a good candidate.

So the problem with a warm pond is that it stabilises - goes to equilibrium - very quickly. But a sea vent is a themal/chemical flow. It is an active instability. And Lane makes the argument for how life first arose as a managing force in that kind of scenario.

However, this still does seem a generally physicalist account, in that it seems to assume that the biochemical gives rise to, or is prior to, the symbolic - that the ability to speak and abstract is itself the product of biochemistry. So I don't see how here the distinction between information and matter is really maintained - the former is simply an outcome of the latter. — Wayfarer

Well it ain’t a generally material account if it says that symbols or information are nature’s other aspect. So it may be generally physicalist, but it is a semiotic physicalism. It is a full four causes physicalism. And that is hardly a regular notion of physicalism - for the guy in the street anyway. Actual physics has already jumped on the information theoretic/dissipative structure bandwagon and so is cool with this paradigm.

A circle of inter-independent origination. — Janus

Yep.

Why so sour? You can read all about the biophysics in Peter Hoffman’s Life’s Ratchet.

To say life is managed instability is to explain the nature of the connection between matter and symbol, or metabolism and replication.

The usual bottom-up view of causation presumes life needs stable material foundations. It builds itself up from concrete parts.

However the reason why the symbol part of the equation - the stuff like the genetic memory that can encode constraints - can actually work is that it acts to regulate the unstable. If the physics has rigid stability, how could information push it in any direction? But if the physics is balanced on an instability, a point of bifurcation, then it is like a switch that can be tipped by the barest nudge.

So that is how semiotic control can arise. That is how symbols can control states of matter. The matter has to be in a state that is inherently unstable and hence able to be nudged in a direction that is some higher level informational choice.

That is the trick of life. It is the combination of information and matter, a system able to be directed with a purpose because the matter is poised to be tipped and has the least amount of telos concerning its actual state as is possible.

Stable matter knows what it wants to be. It is deterministic. But instability is freedom just begging to be harnessed. It solves the mystery of how symbols could affect the actions of anything.

And how life goes is how mind goes. The same applies when it comes to closing the explanatory gap between matter and symbol there.

If stability is achieved then there is no more instability to be managed. — Metaphysician Undercover

You must be right! Clearly once you have achieved a steady balance on your bike, you could never subsequently wobble or fall off. Genius.

Homeostasis assumes that stability is the goal — Metaphysician Undercover

Adult male cow manure. It refers to a stable balance. The balance is the goal that the system recovers to after perturbations or excursions.

It's blatant contradiction that I have difficulty with. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you construct your own confusions.

Ever ridden a bike? Is there no homeostatic balance involved in managing its instability?

You said "life is managed instability". If homeostasis excludes instability, then it excludes life if life is managed instability. Either life is not managed instability, or it is not homeostatic. Which do you believe? — Metaphysician Undercover

I love your difficulty with simple sentences.

this excludes homeostasis, as instability excludes stability. — Metaphysician Undercover

LOL. It is homeostasis that is the process "excluding" instability and thus creating - dynamical - stability.

Homeostasis implies equilibrium, but the living systems are growing and reproducing. Growing and reproducing, which is what living beings do, cannot be represented as homeostasis which is a form of equilibrium. — Metaphysician Undercover

Life is managed instability. So homeostasis is central to that. The central problem is not about how to grow or how to fragment. It is about how to hold together in controlled fashion.

From what I've read, Rosen argues to maintain a distinction between living systems (as anticipatory systems) and inanimate systems, by describing living systems according to function rather than by describing them as material activity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course I make the same semiotic distinction. And note how it is functionality that is then the basis of any deeper underlying continuity. The telos they have in common is entropy dissipation.

Evidence based policy making has been a thing for a decade.

The attempts of apokrisis are therefore quite futile, since he doesn't understand that his fundamental assumption of the goodness of nature is precisely what naturalism is incapable of grounding... — Thorongil

Again, I never said Nature is fundamentally good. It is what it is. And we get to make it what it is - for us - to an increasing extent.

I might ask the same of your naturalism. — darthbarracuda

Sure. And the point about it being a metaphysics of immanent being is that it is founded on its dichotomies, not founded on a transcendent negating. Nature doesn't have to be the fallen to your moral purity. It doesn't have to be the imperfect to your Platonic good. So even if good and evil were in play here - your basic argument - nature would be the separation into good and evil as the limits on being, and then some rational balance as the existence defined by those diametrically opposed limits.

But good and evil don't really feature as they are not a good candidate dichotomy for a realistic model of nature. They lack the causal complementarity that is a defining feature of a functional system - one that actually encodes a goal of some kind.

Think again about the systems view of sociology. Civilisation is not about good vs evil. It is about the complementary dynamic that is competition and co-operation. Both the extremes are "good" because together they are synergistic.

You can work away on "good and evil" to try to hone them into that kind of complementary dynamic. You can go the Hegelian route of saying evil needs to exist, so that it can be overcome. The good can't actually be good unless it was challenged and won. But again, that is just giving a nod to immanence on the way to arriving back at a transcendent aesthetic. The claim that there is only one true absolute, not instead the one irreducibly complex dynamic.

There's a common trend in philosophical trends around the globe that see the Good as transcending the material and/or natural realm, often in a spiritual way. — darthbarracuda

Exactly. And antinatalism is the heir to that. Theism based itself on the idea that our everyday world represents the fallen state. Therefore the truth of being had to be transcendent of that. Romanticism was then the reaction to Enlightenment science. It actually quite suited that new theology to believe Newton and Darwin may have dis-enchanted the material world, but the individual human spirit and its purest feelings then represented the actually transcendent. Nothing essential need change, even if God was dead.

Existentialism, pessimism and anti-natalism are the continued working out of that theology. But one that gradually turns the hopefulness of the Romantics into the tragedy of the lost souls doomed to wander in mortal guise until some final decisive act of release.

Antinatalism, in a philosophical pessimistic sense, is a spiritual position in that it tries to deny the immanent, natural world in favor of an alternate reality - typically Nothing. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. The Romantic turns around to Science and says you have proved everything is in fact nothing. Existence is random and meaningless. Therefore - as a disappointed child addressing its cold-hearted parent - I want to die! I want my revenge of taking your nothingness and demanding it right now for everyone!

Do you ever think all the suffering on Earth since day uno of its inception maybe isn't a good thing? — darthbarracuda

What are you talking about? Is the Earth tormented by the heat of its molten interior. Is it in agony with the ripping and tearing of its crust. Is the rain of asteroids an unbearable torment?

It is unbelievable how you and the other anti-natalists think hyperbole makes your philosophising anything else but comical.

How we should live life - especially right now when on the ecological brink - is a serious matter. There really ain't time to waste on this anti-natalist pissing about.

Apokrisis has failed to provide a convincing reason why we should see nature as fundamentally agreeable and right. — darthbarracuda

You mean you simply fail to see that my position - based on the immanence of self-organising systems - wouldn't even seek to make one extreme of existence fundamental. What is fundamental is the triadic thing of two complementary limits and their self-perpetuating balance.

Respect would be the conclusion that in the long run, x is generally right.

Tolerance would be the conclusion that in the long run, x is essentially noise. :grin:

More than 50%?!?

Oh, sure....

Because morality is oftentimes diametrically opposed to the natural. — darthbarracuda

Yeah. And what would Nature be diametrically opposed to here. The Artificial? The Unnatural? The Supernatural? Which of these is your chosen basis for moral imperatives? What makes them better, exactly?

A morality based on the natural world would be a non-morality, akin to basing morality on a deity that, by any modern standard of morality, is a twisted psycho. — darthbarracuda

But you are the one who seems to hate or dread the very notion of life, of existence. You want to wish it all away, regardless of what the more general wishes of folk might be.

Shouldn’t society be able to decide on the morality of its own being? Who are you to deny that?

Deflection. I asked about the probability of your torturer/Stockholm syndrome applying. I asked what percentage you might actually claim as a reasonable guesstimate.

You avoided a direct answer.

I'm thinking that DNA is the current flavour of formal causes. Do you have a different candidate? — tim wood

Yes, DNA is the canonical example of formal cause or top-down constraint here. So my position - the semiotic one - is about generalising that.

Thus I recognise a major discontinuity in nature, as well as an underlying continuity, when it comes to telos.

Life and mind are different in that they have the memory mechanisms to encode the information that constrains their material dynamics. Organisms are different in that they have autonomy and what we would mean by true purpose. Physical systems only have tendencies or propensities as they reflect the information that is encoded externally in their environments.

So I am not arguing anything mystical.

My response to the OP quotes was that they looked to get things the wrong way round. The material world is already reasonable or intelligible because its dynamism is formed or shaped by constraints. Life and mind are just the same story, with the twist that organisms can remember habits of constraint and so start to act from their own stored context of goals, purposes and reasons.

I lean toward regarding the "mystery" as an artifact of a certain kind of thinking. — tim wood

But the “how” of the least action principle is an important question to tackle if you are interested in developing new physics.

Unlike a particular or accidental mystery - like perhaps the glass of water on your desk - it is a general or universal level mystery. If you want an emergent or thermal model of time, for instance, then the metaphysical issues raised by the principle of least action are at the centre of that.

Why is nature such a dirty word to antinatalists? How has it become the ulitimate source of their intellectual discomforts?

God didn't ground morality so much as he limited it. — darthbarracuda

A constraint??? :gasp:

When God is dead, humans are confronted with a vast sense of moral responsibility, being the sole reservoirs with any moral sense in the universe. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, there is Naturalism. Wave goodbye to the Big Daddy in the sky, say hello Mama Nature.

Why wouldn't we want to understand life and mind, hence even morality, as natural phenomena? What good argument do you have on that?

Or is it just some kind of mechanics that is obvious when well-explained. — tim wood

Well that is the big question. Can you succeed where others have failed?

We can of course find approximative and perturbative mathematical techniques that do work well enough to solve problems as if they were simply a matter of determinist mechanics. But that then is to ignore the metaphysical mystery of how nature arrives at its rather more exact solutions.

In passing, your definition of telos as encompassing what you have listed seems to broaden and stretch telos beyond the limits of any original significance. If telos is that broad, then it means merely that there's a cause - and that's already presupposed! — tim wood

Or else it deflates the rather inflated notion of telos that folk have in the first place. I prefer to look at it that way.

It avoids being a mind~world dualist, while accepting that mechanistic physics is only talking about half the cause in its stress on the material, rather than the formal, causes of physical being.

So yes, if we go your pragmatism route then many ethical categories don't make sense. I'm saying that's an argument against your pragmatism, and a very powerful one too given your apparent inability to shrug off what you claim is romantic nonsense. — darthbarracuda

In the end, I'm not religious. I don't believe in transcendent being. Naturalism is the position that there is only nature and its immanent meaning.

So there is a stark choice when it comes to metaphysics. You can be like me, or be like you.

But I can show you my workings-out. I can point to the pragmatist metaphysics and their resulting history of successful empirical inquiry.

God is dead. He never lived. Moral dilemmas can only find a grounding context in Nature itself. Get used to it. ;)

I didn't think it relevant, and thought you'd straw man it anyway. — darthbarracuda

There must be a fallacy which is the fallacy of posters hoping to win debates by claiming every possible fallacy that springs to mind once all their other arguments have disintegrated.

Yet the choice to commit to the "pragmatic route" must also be subjectively motivated, no? — darthbarracuda

Pragmatism is about collectively demonstrated truths - what a community of rational inquirers would believe in the end.

So it both accepts the subjectivity of phenomenality, and it then sets out the method that can achieve the most objectivity in the light of that constraint.

I'm fine with you going the pragmatic route, so long as you recognize that this isn't a moral avenue. — darthbarracuda

But why should I accept your dualism? You can propose it. I simply show its incoherence.

Your decision to pursue the "scientific" route here is not a God-given decree but probably something to do with your character and background. — darthbarracuda

Sure. I hope it has everything to do with my character and background. God certainly had nothing to do with it.

I dislike how you claim to speak for all scientists on matters outside of the domain of science. — darthbarracuda

Yet you are fine telling all natalists how they are simply irrational in their delusions about life having a value for them.