The map would be the view from nowhere. It stands outside the world it describes. So that would indeed seem a problem.

But I am defending Peircean internalism. Now the map is part of its world in being map of one of its complementary bounding limits. It is the view from the inside - while the whole shebang is still developing - of its structure as it will be frozen at the end of time. That is, its Heat Death.

And then as I said, the Peircean view treats chance or contingency as real. That is the other bound, the other limitation on being, that can be seen from the inside.

In terms of a developing cosmos, the most absolute state of chance is that which prevailed at its beginning. The hot and quantum Big Bang in other words.

So Peirce provides a map from inside the whole. In one direction, flattened to its descriptive extreme is our view of the Universe’s Heat Death. The ultimate structural outcome. And flattened in the other direction is our map, our scientific view, of the beginning of the Universe in a state of absolute potentiality or chance.

And funny that this type of thinking can only take hold (even in a minor way) in the top ten percent of countries by level of quality of life in just about every indicator. — Baden

Yep. By definition, anyone posting here about antinatalism has a full belly, a roof over their heads, time on their hands. They can take for granted all the civilised advantages that hold real discomfort at bay.

But that would be the irony. Take away the few big discomforts of life and that frees up the mind to start noticing all the tinier ones. Which are far more numerous in their diversity.

A crooked painting can cause me psychic pain. I can't even bear cotton t-shirts anymore - too heavy and restrictive. It's got to be micro-merino next to my skin. :)

So it is easy to see how a generalised dissatisfaction arises. The more luxurious your life, the more you can become overwhelmed by everything that is just slightly not perfect about it.

'All theories are tools, including this one' is one flavor of that closure, and more traditional metaphysical visions is another. — syntax

But all theories are the same kind of tool - a map by which to navigate the territory. So while - like blind men feeling an elephant - that might result in many partial mappings, there is still that single territory being explored.

And there could also be the most complete map possible map. The Map of Everything.

In regards to the contrast between lived life and metaphysical maps, a map is created by abstracting away the accidental to arrive at the necessary.

So actual life is rich because it it rich with a history of accidents, fluctuations, contingencies and particulars. Chance and unpredictability are basic to actual existence. And inexplicable to the degree they are just accidents.

So I - as with Peirce - in fact take the particularity of individual existence to be ontically fundamental. Unlike other brands of metaphysics, chance is treated as basic. We can't say why some radioactive atom actually decayed at precisely that moment. It really was uncaused and spontaneous.

My approach is thus far more generous to that other side of the story. It treats chance happenings as irreducible. They are not going to get explained away by hidden variables, or still more microscopic nudges.

But then the other side of the coin is that Peircean semiotics is founded also on the growth of global habits, the emergence of structural-level necessity. Peirce called it the spontaneity of tychism vs the continuity of synechism.

And metaphysics - as the mapping of the grand synechectic structure of existence, the very shapes of habits - derives its model of the Cosmos by abstracting away all that is just the accidental or particular about the actual world. The map metaphysics produces is of what is structurally - mathematically - necessary in terms of a globally-organising set of constraints.

It is just like real maps - the kind you use to get around. The metaphysics wants to boil away the unneeded detail. It wants to create a picture of the world that doesn't tell you what kind of trees grow on that there hill this year, or the colour of the front door that Mr Smith chose a few months back. Instead, the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths. That is, where are the constraints, where are the degrees of freedom.

So to call a metaphysical model a tool is too general. There are many kinds of tools.

The kind of tool we are talking about here is a map. And maps are interested in the global structure of an environment, not its inessential details.

Yeah. Apologies. I reread and see you were being anti-antinatalist there. :blush:

And?

[....fades and crackles because we're still in the conceptual safe space] — csalisbury

Given you are posting in a thread dominated by the like-minded, which of us would be in that conceptual safe space? ;)

Alongside positive psychology, — darthbarracuda

Alongside? In what sense are they treated with the same scientific/therapeutic respect?

But those don't make people feel good. — darthbarracuda

Ah. So they are better because they don't paper over the essential badness of existence! For people in a hole, they are a help to dig the hole deeper.

Literature and, to an extent, religion, are treasures that are manifestations of hopes and dreams of real human beings. They ought to be taken as testimonies of the experiences of real people, not dismissed as being somehow fake or opaque. — darthbarracuda

I was talking about them as a metaphysical-strength basis for generalised theories. But if you want to understand them in terms of the social construction of the "human condition", they are good anthropological data. That's exactly what anthropologists do.

First off, antinatalism need not depend on the claim that everyone's lives suck. I don't know why you keep bringing this up... — darthbarracuda

Probably because antinatalists keep mentioning it. Although I agree, you might take the more interesting position that basically life is 99% OK for you, but the 1% that sucks then makes the very idea of living an intolerable burden. Even the possibility of dying slowly in a mangled car wreck means an otherwise cheerful life is a metaphysical no no.

That being said, I do think even the best lives are still quite atrocious. — darthbarracuda

There you go.

Any counterargument to this will require some form of justification of this reality - basically you need to provide a theodicy. — darthbarracuda

Well I can't get over the hopeless irrationality of a view that says a 99% full glass is still a cosmic tragedy in its 1% emptiness.

I mean I scrapped a knuckle doing some gardening this afternoon. It bled a little.

Even worse, the fibre cable installers cut through the underlawn irrigation despite me telling them exactly where to look out for it. Oh, the agony.

And yet I don't regret having been born. It's been another great day.

I accept one part of antinatalism. We ought to consider long and hard about bringing kids into the world. The future could be quite dicey.

But then that just commits you morally to doing the best that you can for them if you do. There is nothing particular to fear about life as a journey in itself. The variety of that journey, the challenges it presents, is pretty much the point.

To build a cult around persuading everyone to stop having kids seems weird. Frankly it is weird. It has value only as an illustration of what bad philosophy looks like.

Social constructionism tries my patience severely. — Thorongil

Sounds legit.

Yet there is a difference between science of life and life as it is lived. — darthbarracuda

Only the difference between the theory and its application. If the theory is right.

You say the self is fluid, but the self we value as a self is precisely the differentiating self. — darthbarracuda

Really? Do you speak for the entirety of humanity throughout human history on this score? A little presumptive and not much supported by the evidence.

My argument is that most people should construct their identity in a way that does express the possibilities of (fruitful) differentiation. But balance would involve also expressing a matching desire for (fruitful) integration.

And so similarly we cannot help but see the self as a soul-like resident of the body. — darthbarracuda

Why does that have to be so? I absolutely don't see it that way. A rational science like positive psychology certainly wouldn't teach things to be that way.

It is only if you can't escape the clutches of literature and religion that you would be trapped in such a myopic view of personal identity.

To say the antinatalist point doesn't work because soul-like selves do not exist in reality is akin to saying the antinatalist point doesn't work because there is no such thing as free will, or God, or whatever, and this risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. — darthbarracuda

The only risk is folk building bad morality from bad metaphysics.

So your precious thing - the differentiate and competitive aspect of personal identity - is not getting chucked out here. Instead you are being introduced to its complementary twin that also wants to share the bath.

You seem to have tipped this other poor baby out. I found it crawling around on the slippery floor and return it to you. :)

Antinatalism is about taking control of one of the few things we actually do have control over. — darthbarracuda

It's attacking the symptoms rather than the causes.

Life is not "working". It's not up to standards and it never will be. — darthbarracuda

But whose standards? Sure, you can decide that it ain't up to your standards. But as an antinatalist - indeed a strident antinatalist like Schop - you are trying to force your standards on me. And the whole of humanity if you could.

So just note how you choose the third person voice. You already presume that objectively, for any possible person, life doesn't work. Thus you hope to win by rhetoric an argument you can't sustain by logic.

The pragmatic solution is to conserve what resources you do have and stop wasting them on future progeny. — darthbarracuda

That is utilitarianism - and many people do understand pragmatism to be nothing more than a selfish instrumentality.

So we have gone around the complete circle that is the limits of your metaphysics. We are selfish inherently. Therefore pragmatism can only be the instrument for satisfying the desires of this self. That is all pragmatism could mean.

Damn. You seem to have toppled your favourite baby's neglected twin out of the bathtub again. I've tripped over him crawling about on the wet floor.

You sneak in a lot of YOUR preferences as what OUGHT to be. — schopenhauer1

Alternatively, I simply speak to our best science-backed understanding of the reality. It makes a change to the literary or religious ways of addressing life's essential questions.

Anyways, I'm going off the main point which is again, just because identity may be created from group dynamics, does not negate the fact that someone can evaluate LIFE (in total) and deem it an existence that they do not want a future person to have to experience. — schopenhauer1

Sure. But why wouldn't those people be regarded as in need of the appropriate therapeutic help?

Diversity of views and experience may be healthy. My model already speaks to differentiation and competition as a fundamental part of the equation.

But antinatalism - in its monotonic obsessiveness - is then one-sided, and so unhealthy and irrational.

One would be crazy to agree with its view of existence.

And I already told you my ethic which is that if life has structural and contingent suffering — schopenhauer1

You have indeed told me that repeatedly and obsessively. My reasonable reply remains the same. On the whole, life seems pretty good for me and my family. I don't claim that this holds as a universal human view, but most folk - if asked - tend to appreciate the fact of having the chance to have lived.

So it is you who is guilty of mistaking a model of reality for reality.

Life may have to contain the possibility of suffering, but only so it can contain its "other" of flourishing. If you want to talk about structure, you would need to face up to its irreducible complexity in this regard.

Your antinatalism is reductionist and simplistic. It is not in fact structuralism. Like religion and literature, it treats experience like a monadic substance.

The objection I will raise here is that you are making it seem as though because the self is socially constructed, it must be within our control to destroy this same self. — darthbarracuda

I don't follow. It is not about a destruction. It would be about a fluid negotiation.

If the self is contextual, then it is the product of some dynamical balance. What I am saying is that it is not a substantial and located object - a mind or soul that inheres in a body. It is instead a relation between bodies and their worlds. And with linguistically/culturally evolved humans, it is then the self that forms as a result of that higher level of interplay between a social creature and its social world.

That is explicit in a general theory like anthropology. Society is understood as a dynamical system - the balancing of the complementary tendencies of competition and co-operation, or differentiation and integration.

So selfhood exists fluidly as this negotiation. I am more a singular psychological self to the degree I express a competitive and differentiated state of being. And I am more a collective social self to the degree I express the counter-tendencies of a co-operative and integrative state of being.

Thus personal identity is not monadic - a single inherent stuff. It is the balancing of the two complementary tendencies which form the third thing of a body in a relation with its world, a person in a relation with their society.

And where we stand on this spectrum at any moment - competitive vs co-operative, differentiated vs integrated - is a pragmatic issue. We would want the self which is the most effective and best adapted in terms of the long run goals - the long run evolutionary goals that shaped the whole system in play.

So this is the science-based framework through which I would view the "philosophy" of antinatalism.

Antinatalism depends on a theistic/romantic metaphysical model - one that treats mind or identity as something inherent to a body. A soul stuff of some sort or other. But I am arguing from the point of view where the mind or the self is emergent from the pragmatism of a modelling relation.

And so the locus of "the self" is a fluid thing - one poised between two complementary directions. And the optimal balance is a constant negotiation - one we are expected to actively partake in, especially in a civilised society. We are meant to be free to choose whether to be more competitive or more co-operative, more differentiated or more integrated, as best suits the prevailing context or situation.

That is what we want people in general to be good at doing. Striking the healthy balance which sees the whole flourish.

Antinatalism is instead about curling up in the corner and wishing you were dead. It is giving up on the possibility of "controlling things" - or rather, being a properly active part of the negotiations always going on "out there" in the real social world.

And I still agree that it may be the case the real social world has rather spun out of control in many regards. Maybe the problems aren't even fixable.

That could be argued. But still I would say it is excessively pessimistic. Most people don't feel that their life is that bad.

Do you think that's possible - ''Omnipotent'' cells capable of any possible bodlily function and still able to undego cell division? — TheMadFool

Cells are omnipotent in that they all carry around the same kitset of genes. But they become specialised in their expression of those genes so as to form specific functional structures like lung tissue or brain tissue. A higher level of intercellular signalling suppresses the generic genetic potential to create the specialised functionalities.

So it is the constraint on that generality that leads to the complexity of a body with an organ system. That makes it "impossible" to have generalist cells that are also, at the same time, specialists at everything. The specialism is what emerges due to the cell being constrained within a context of collective action. The functionality is a property of the higher level of organisation and so cannot inhere in the cell itself.

Well, I disagree, so I don't see this conversation going any further. — Thorongil

I can see that you disagree. And that you failed to provide a counter-argument. So yes, you have bowed out as far as any conversation goes.

Why have children? "Because I want to be a more selfless person." That is inherently selfish. — Thorongil

Word play. My argument was that selfhood is fluid. So we can (socially) construct a contracted definition of the self - as a solipsistic soul stuff. Or we can recognise that selves arise contextually to serve purposes, and so a social-level of self is also a thing.

Now you can refuse to accept the validity of social psychology here - despite the evidence. You can assert that selfhood is "inherent" and not contextual. And that would indeed be the mainstream unscientific point of view.

But there - I've called it as it is.

Why be an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher? How do we decide that it's better (for us) to accurately model existence with words than to blow on a saxophone and create an ecstasy without words? — syntax

Well yes. I do what I do because it has extraordinary beauty for me. It is thrilling to grasp the true mathematical structure of existence.

And it is not a merely word-based understanding - some kind of formula to incant. It is about actually being able to see and feel this structure in the mind's eye, recognise its form in every encounter with the world.

Any philosophical theory, no matter how grand or successful, is still a mere conceptual piece of reality as a whole. It exists among toothaches, beautiful faces, and screams in the distance at night. It exists among other grand theories, equally plausible or implausible, at least until further investigation. — syntax

I disagree. As I say, it is instead like learning to see. Except that rather than just seeing the world of everyday appearances, it is seeing through to the very pattern of existence itself.

You know something abstract is right when suddenly everything that was fuzzy or confused clicks into sharp focus. It all connects up logically in a self-explanatory way.

So (as you may well understand), it's not about opposing abstract thought to sensuality but rather about opposing abstract thought to the richness of an experience that includes all abstract thought, and not just that grand theory. — syntax

But that is why I disagree. The richness of experience is the immersive view, the subjective pole of being. I know what it feels like to live in the world. And so by contrast I know what it is like to be living in the world of the abstract.

As I say, it is not about simply having a theory. It is about being able to experience the abstract realm that is the territory for which the theory is the map. It becomes a place that you can go.

Of course, if your knowledge of maths and science is a bunch of fragments with no metaphysical structure, then you can't have it as this internal Platonic realm that you experience. You actually have to spend a long time building up that integrated picture that brings it fully alive.

In the quote above, I don't see how [2] cancels [1]. Are you offering a model, a useful perspective? Or something more? Do you grant that theories are not life/existence itself? That all theories are 'smaller' than existence? — syntax

I answered that more fully in the reply to @Srap Tasmaner a post ago.

And no, I see life/existence as the world of mere appearances - at least in being the foreshortened subjective view of what it is to be me, some bag of flesh and prosaic needs, in some highly particular moment of the here and now. And then the Peircean theory is the map of the abstract or objective reality of which my immediate pressing existence is a tiny accidental shard.

So yes. A theory is just a theory. A map is just a map. Screw one up and draw another.

But then what could really drive me? It is only that you can get to experience the wholeness of reality as it comes alive gradually as a living structure in your thoughts.

Isn't that what everyone seeks from metaphysics? And so, that makes the best metaphysics such a worthwhile journey.

What I'm struggling to get across is the oddity of your position, and it's probably just the Peirce thing.

On the one hand, there is this sort of messianic quality to your system.... That doesn't look like the sort of instrumentalist version of pragmatism that this does: — Srap Tasmaner

That's quite right. There is the epistemic version and the ontic version. There is pragmatism and then there is semiosis. So there is the Peirce that is just a story about scientific method or theories of truth, and then there is the Peirce with an architectonic system, a process philosophy theory of the Cosmos itself.

In a nutshell, Peirce starts from phenomenology. He gives an account of how a mind could even know a world. So that gives us the semiotic modelling relation. It is a story of the psychology.

That then lays the basis for a pragmatic epistemology. The reason why minds can work to know a world is abstracted so that it becomes a generalised theory of truth or well-founded belief. It becomes a tripartite system of world, sign and habit of interpretance. The scientific method.

But then this same abstract structure can be generalised ontically to be the story of creation or being itself.

It already starts with a foot in ontology. Semiosis is how minds know worlds and so it is what is the case about actual psychology. It is the theory of how that has to work in a basic way. (And that is also what psychology has agreed, at least in the kind of enactive, embodied, ecological and naturalistic models that have come to the fore once we got over the hump of cognitive representationalism.)

Now also a semiotic ontology is sweeping biology. Theoretical biologists like Howard Pattee, Robert Rosen and Stan Salthe always were taking a basically semiotic view. But these days it is being explicitly recognised by the rise of biosemiosis as a distinctive field of research.

So it is not hard to see the linkage between epistemology and ontology when it comes to life and mind. They are "knowing processes". So a theory of semiosis is about both how life and mind can even be the case, and also what it is that works best if we want to keep stepping up the game through reasoned inquiry.

But then comes the speculative metaphysics. And I quite openly call it that. Like Peirce, the next step seems obviously to consider whether the physical world in general - the Cosmos - is created and organised semiotically. Is the thesis of pan-semiosis true?

I, of course, think that yes, this looks like the final theory. I have a lot of fun arguing for it. And if you pay close attention to current fundamental physics, you can see how it is basically pan-semiotic. It just happens to call itself something else - information theoretic.

In which case, the noise in our models is also signal, and what sense now can be given to "wrong"? If you put "wrongness" in scare-quotes, is this still pragmatism? — Srap Tasmaner

You have answered your own question. I use scare quotes to show that noise - being "other" - is also part of any signal in being the background to that signal. It is what is ignored - the void, the meaningless backdrop - so that what matters, some event, can be seen as individuated and distinct.

Meaningfulness - a signal or sign - is created by the discard of information. The more you can afford to ignore, the more preciously you are treating what you allow to remain.

What immortality? Germ-lines can become extinct like anything else. — Akanthinos

Clearly the word you intended earlier was obtuse. It is my efforts to enlighten you which have proved otiose.

But if you do have any further interest in the biological arguments, try Nick Lane's The Vital Question. It deals with just this issue.

Organismal immortality does not prevent evolution. — Akanthinos

You are talking right past my point again.

The immortality of the germ-line had to be physically separated from the mortality of the stem-line to achieve even basic multicellular complexity. And while stem cells can just keep growing - turning into whatever tissue they are being told to express by their surrounding mature cells - there is a general framework of regulation that is a kill switch on those possibilities.

The stem cells are stopped from producing the wrong tissues. They are told even when to stop producing. And then mature cells are regulated by similar collective signalling. You have apoptotic control.

So organismic-level immortality did prevent the evolution of complex structure. That is why a germ-line/stem-line dichotomy had to be evolved. The immortality had to be locked away in its own box. And then that made the soma disposable enough that it could become highly adapted as a system of specialised organs - none of which could survive on their own, but which might occasionally slip the leash of regulation to become cancers.

So it might not be the preordained death of an organism because some kind of genetic clock has ticked away the time to the appointed moment for a suicide. But the OP asked in what way might death be evolved as a practical advantage, and I was addressing the OP ... until you butted in.

These are the claims that you made in your post, and they were incorrect, and as usual you tried to deflect by writing a barely-related envolee lyrique. — Akanthinos

Since you had butted in, I thought I would cover off the senescence issue as well as regeneration/metamorphosis. It might have been of interest.

And your claims about what I claimed are plainly incorrect.

Bloody hell, how fucking otiose can someone be??? — Akanthinos

Yep. I was certainly wondering.

The point is that there is a colossal step between cell-suicide and programmed organismal death. — Akanthinos

Good job I didn't claim that then. That level of eugenic control has only really become possible for human society. ;)

I was talking about the death of possibilities, the termination of development - the positive step of making the soma disposable so as to make the germ-line evolvable.

If you want to make some more simplistic reading of what I wrote, I guess I can't stop you.

Another way of looking at it is the lifecycle model of development - the three natural stages of immaturity, maturity and senescence.

When you are young and stupid, you also have degrees of freedom to burn. You can recover quickly from mistakes, repair any damage, as the body and mind are still in learning mode, not yet established in strong habits.

When you are mature, you have a nice healthy balance of plasticity and stability. You can still recover from perturbations and mishaps, but also you are pretty well efficiently adapted to your environment. You are set up structurally to be doing mostly the right thing.

But this habit-forming - this burning off of the plasticity to lay down confirmed wise habit - keeps on going. Eventually we become so well adapted to our immediate environment - more efficient, less energy consuming, in meeting our survival goals - that we then become more prone to catastrophic breakdown when that environment changes. We have spent all our recovery powers, all our plasticity, to achieve a really good developmental fit with out world. And then it changes on us,

If the whole population becomes a collection of wonderfully adapted old farts - then that works super well until, suddenly, unpredictably, it doesn't.

So yeah. I started with the accidental nature of death. Mostly we would say it is the world that terminates our usefulness.

But then deliberate death also slips into the picture - as the basis for accessing a wider range of complexity-dependent evolutionary possibility. Scheduled, or just statistically reliable, terminations become a useful thing.

Work to do what? — Srap Tasmaner

In the context of what I said, it would be about working for those of us with the totalising metaphysical project of having a workable Theory of Everything.

Neither the goal nor the agent were concealed in what I wrote. I was arguing quite explicitly for the possibility of such a metaphysical ToE. I was dealing with the "paradox" of how we could advance a totalising scheme in such a way that it didn't then just blindly assimilate every possible fact to it.

It is a problem if a totalising metaphysics in fact offers no counter-factuals. It couldn't then discover itself to be wrong.

But I replied suck it and see. Pragmatism says "wrongness" is to be expected. The question then becomes whether the wrongness observed as the general is advanced to explain the particular is a case of signal or noise. Is there something significant not being explained? Or are all the inevitable exceptions to the rule just meaningless noise? A constraints-based ontology does give the grounds for making this very distinction. That is one of the key ways it is "better".

Well, yeah, but to be fair, so does all form of complex cellular life. — Akanthinos

Wasn't that my point? Structural complexity depends on controlled death. And hydra are already complex enough for that to be a factor.

This doesn't mean that organismal death is itself pre-programmed. — Akanthinos

Again, it is an evolutionary story. If complex structure depends on controlled death, then control over that death will become increasingly a feature.

The point was to show how the agent's judgment that what they did "works" could be faulty, unless some goal is taken as the goal relative to which a judgment of effectiveness is made. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't get you. Sure, the definition of an agent, of autonomy, would be the freedom to do something contrary or "other". But that freedom is still contextual. You still have people giving some kind of justification, as if that justification matters.

If they did the wrong thing by mistake or misunderstanding, that is one kind story - please ignore my accident. And if they did it for deliberate reason, then it becomes the something else of whose understanding is correct.

But what does any of that have to do with anything here? It certainly doesn't pose a problem for my holism.

If you want to judge what "works", you have to settle first what the goal is, and in many cases whose goal it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, so what? How does that change anything for my point of view?

That is what I've been asking you to clarify. How your occasional appeals to a pragmatic "this, because it works" slot into your system. Works to do what? To study effectively or to get a good grade? And whose goals are we talking about? — Srap Tasmaner

I am putting forward a completely general scheme. That was the whole point. I am defending a totalising metaphysics.

And you seem worried about the variety of possible particular expressions of that general semiotic machinery - even if every case might be an expression of those general principles.

I've said nature itself is irreducibly telic. There is always finality or a goal in play. And there will always then be some best route to the goal. Nature has no real choice but to follow the path of least action.

So that is the general scheme. And I've explained how it would apply in your various suggested examples.

What else is there to clarify?

But it is also true that hydra depend on apoptosis, or programmed cell death, to rein in what would otherwise become runaway tissue growth. So death in this form become a necessity of the most simple metazoans.

The highly conserved morphological features of apoptosis suggest that it is under genetic control...

[Hydra] budding is dependent on feeding: well-fed polyps produce roughly one bud per day; starved polyps cease to form buds after 1–2 days. This striking dependence of budding on feeding is not due to a change in cell proliferation, as initially anticipated, but rather to apoptosis...

In reflecting on possible scenarios which might have led to this close association of apoptosis with metazoan evolution, we are impressed by the need to reduce cell-cell competition in multicellular tissues....

https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/45/4/631/636419

So yes. Simpler animals can afford the luxury of regeneration and metamorphosis. They can recycle cells as the raw material to remodel their structure.

But it is genetically controlled death - the evolution of death as a further now conclusive stage to life - that shows its face even in hydra. Deliberate death was the step underpinning evolutionary access to greater structural complexity.

So, what does the Theory of Evolution say about death? — TheMadFool

Death has both genetic and environmental components. We die because it's programmed in our genes and also because we succumb to environmental stresses. — TheMadFool

Yes. The theory is that evolvability itself evolves. If you want to achieve greater biological complexity, there is an advantage in dividing things sharply between a mortal body and an immortal germ-line.

So the reason is to allow evolution to access the possibilities of greater structural complexity. Like sex, it had to happen to allow the step from simple bacteria to complex multicellular organisms.

So sex and death do go together.

Bacteria are messy analog creatures. They are promiscuously sexless - forever swapping gene kits even across so called species boundaries. And they are immortal - forever dividing unless hit by some external accident.

But eukaryotes had to create greater digital order. They had to make gene recombination a definite act - a sexual act that divided the flow of evolutionary history into a distinct before and after. And the same for death.

Or rather, it is more subtle. Multicellular organisms needed to separate their immortal germ-line from their developing bodies so that they could start to construct themselves from specialised tissues.

The germ-line - the connecting thread of evolutionary history - had to be tucked away in the gonads or ovaries to allow the other cells get on with their job of turning into lungs, kidneys, brain, muscle, or whatever kind of tissue was their developmental terminus.

So really, the death is the death of alternative developmental possibilities. You can't have lung tissue that wants the autonomy to breed more lungs. Lung tissue that does that is what we call cancer.

But then having specialist reproductive organs - the gonads and ovaries - introduces another problem. As they age, they do accumulate inevitable damage and become too prone to bad mutation.

Now germ-line and stem-line are separated so that one can produce variation while the other avoids it - the stem-line cells just continuing to express the programmed potential to be some kind of tissue like lung. But still, the variation via chromosome recombination is quite different - more tuned and selective in the traits that get exposed to the world - than the kind of brute damage that aging might cause.

So death is an evolved outcome, if a little more indirectly than sex. It is already a de facto presence in the very fact that stem cells are pre-programmed to undergo some certain number of cell-divisions and then - forever - stop. Once our lungs and brains and muscles achieve their proper developmental size, the body is already "dead" so far as its possibilities in that direction goes.

Simpler animals like newts and worms can afford to regenerate limbs and tails. But that stem cell level freedom had to end for good evolutionary reason if nature wanted to access more complex structural possibilities.

So metabolic wearing out is a big reason for death. That is one consequence of achieving complexity - more stuff to go wrong. But also the division of labour - the split between immortal germ-line and disposable soma - is a necessity for achieving complexity of organismic structure.

The lungs can't be allowed to have the ability to live on - spawn away, reproducing themselves - even after the kidneys are shot. The genetics must remain a package deal, tucked away safely, as far from metabolic degradation as possible. The body must perish as a whole so that the immortal part of the business can do its thing of being the continuous historical thread.

The idea that substantial being requires both matter and form is derived from a materialist bias. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean that the idea that it doesn't is derived from theistic necessity. It is an article of faith that there are gods and souls, therefore Aristotle's hylomorphism must be scholastically rendered in a fashion that permits matter-less substantial form.

Materialism (or rather physicalism, if you accept hylomorphism) isn't a bias. It is a belief derived from rational theory and empirical evidence.

"Did you get a job?" is a yes-or-no question. Humans do highly artificial stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

I wish I could follow your leaps. You started making some kind of point about pragmatism’s notion of effectiveness. Now you are talking about mechanical constraints. Any chance of an explanation of the connection?

But yes. Constraints can approach the mechanical limit. We can construct bivalent switches - physically or logically. And that is really basic to semiosis too. It is significant that the digital lies at the terminus of the analog. In the end, dynamical gestures can be fixed and remembered as informational marks.

So in all your examples, there are laid out certain constraints - which presumably are meant to achieve some effective action. And yet the actions look to defy them. A "wrong" procedure is employed to reach the apparent goal.

But the point about constraints is that they don't need to specify the procedures - the precise path taken. This is the physical mystery of the least action principle. Nature manages to find that optimal path ... on the whole ... eventually ... to the degree it matters.

Humans of course do it differently. We construct mechanisms to achieve ends. We take constraint to the point where it becomes logically bivalent or counterfactual. Switch is either on or off. The gate to the paddock of sheep is either open or closed. We take informational steps to control nature.

And we kind of expect that mechanical causal paradigm to apply to nature itself. Hence reductionism. But we know it doesn't. Nature isn't actually a machine. Nature is constrained possibilities. It has an essential holism that our black and white logico-mechanical descriptions do not properly capture.

Here's another: A wedding planner tells one of the staff to put a certain flower arrangement on the dining table, and the ice sculpture on another table. The staff person decides to swap the indicated locations "because it looks better this way." Be that as it may, and whether the event planner agrees, the staff person cannot be said to have done what they were told. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So in reply to me pointing out the contextual social nature of goal-setting, you keep cranking up the degree of constraint to try and close off the possibility of other routes to some goal. You want a path so fixed, so black and white, that there could be no deviation. But that just demonstrates that what I say is correct.

Now what if the staff person switched the flowers and sculpture, then switches them again.

Did this violate the procedure laid down by the planner? The outcome is the intended one. But the planner might feel a little perturbed about the path by which it was reached.

What if the staff person did this repeatedly a few dozen times? Such a procedure wasn't explicitly forbidden. But it might be considered as tacitly excluded for some more general socially constraining reason. The planner would "rightfully" say, mate, now you're just being weird.

So the point is that there is an unbridgable gap between these two causal views of the world - the mechanically absolute and the Peircean pragmatic. But also, it is not a problem that constraints can always be tightened by the addition of further information. Humans in particular have got very good at constructing machines in this fashion.

That is what semiotics is about - the informational machinery that can construct constraints to bind nature to purposes. And complexity arises by layering up this informational mechanism - the codes and memories that regulate physical dynamics. The evolution of life and mind is the story of a succession of ever more generalised and abstract encoding - from membranes to genes to neurons to words to numbers and variables.

Reread that last sentence — Thorongil

You seem more interested in word games than serious arguments.

Maybe you are making the point that all choices serve the interest of some ego - even the desire to be egoless. Ah, sweet paradox!

But remember my ultimate position is that the self itself is a social construct. So egotism - in the true sense - would extend to include the interests of our family, our community, our tribe and humanity in general, as it is that social context which produces the personal individuated "us" in the first place.

So now the issue is what level is egotism being served by a choice - the highly individual or the collectively general? And now a desire to become a better individual by being less egocentric can both serve an interest - as all reasoned action ought - and yet not be egotistical in the sense of having to serve the interests of "my self".

It is not beyond individual human reasonableness to frame a decision in these prosocial terms. And my original reply was highlighting your own apparent presumptions about the ego as something personal, not social.

Again, antinatalism requires theistic/romantic absolutism to get going. It must already believe we are born into the world as feeling souls.

But if instead you take a physicalist/naturalist view of human being, then attention goes to the merits and defects of actual social systems. The increase of reason and civility becomes the thing. It is a paradigm shift in which antinatalism looses all its force.

We could still decide not to have kids because social conditions are such that we are sure they would suffer too much for their existence to be worth it. But that would be a situational decision - one responding to the social context, not the kind of ontically absolute argument that antinatalists want to make about living and "being a self" just on its own.

My point was that effectiveness at achieving a goal at one level may not always count as effectiveness at achieving a goal on another level. — Srap Tasmaner

But you said it as if that was something I needed to give some counter to. So how exactly does that - as something particular - contradict the generality of the pragmatic view?

The very definition of hierarchical levels would require this to be the case. And yet - my earlier point - when we talk about hierarchical order in a fundamental fashion, there are no real internal levels. You have the kind of homogenous interior that is a fractal or scalefree structure.

So even the simplest world - the world without levels - is irreducibly triadic. It consists of its opposed limits, and then the generality that develops over all scales in-between.

That is foundational - Salthe's basic triadic system, Peirce's sign relation. And then complexity arises on that foundation by the marking off of levels by grades of semiosis. We get the kind of subsumptive hierarchies like {propensity {function {purpose}}}, which equates to the familiar divisions of matter, life and mind.

And the answer is "no", no matter what else we say about the situation. — Srap Tasmaner

It is the other way round. You are relying on a highly artificial demarcation that seeks to stop us saying anything else about the situation.

That is why I pointed to the strangeness of your scenario. You want to pretend that this could be a real world dilemma - the smartarse son offering a "re-interpretation" of his father's wishes.

We don't believe the son's rationale for a minute because we wouldn't believe that he believed it for a minute. Bullshit was already being called before it became a problem for pragmatism.

It's a question about how exactly you attach the pragmatist appeal to the effectiveness of a procedure to the hierarchical/holistic/systems science analysis. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So the thing is that the systems view is constraints-based, and hence fundamentally permissive. If it ain't forbidden, it is not just allowed, it has to happen in the long run.

The other way of thinking about causality - the reductionist, materialist, deterministic, atomistic, etc one - would view things as procedures. There is a program, a sequence, a law, to be followed.

But a holistic approach talks of habits and limits. If there is a fence around the paddock, then the sheep will be found inside. But the sheep are not only then free to be anywhere inside, they must be everywhere inside at some time or other.

So the fence encodes a desire. And at the same time it encodes its own degree of indifference. It only has to be effective in confining the sheep in a way that makes a sharp hierarchical distinction between being inside vs being outside.

If the father's constraint is simply that the son must return with money, theft has yet to be ruled out. It thus becomes - by that definition - a matter of indifference to the dad. The son would be right to complain about being told off for robbing the store. That wasn't a no-no under the job description given him.

But if the father's constraint was to find paid labour, that is an entirely different story. Now the son might go out and be a rent boy - and again complain about being told off when his dad seems annoyed at this particular choice.

So that is how it works. If you pen sheep with a fence, they then fill that space with their motion in an essentially free and random fashion - at least from your established point of view. The field of sheep finds its own least action equilibrium state. If you measured some critical parameter, like the length of the grass, it would be trimmed at a steady rate across the whole paddock in an efficient fashion.

Reductionist metaphysics believes in worlds ruled by deterministic procedures. Holism believes in worlds that self-organise due to generalised constraints.

Think about the principle of least action (PLA). It really is the most profound of mysteries for the usual phyicalist view.

Nature has to know all the different ways of getting to wherever it wants to go to reliably find the shortest path possible. The very success of the PLA killed our normal notions of cauality and locality even before quantum mechanics hammered in the last nails of the coffin.

See for example -

Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

I didn't give an argument, I made a distinction, one that refutes the alleged nonselfish reason for procreation you tried to give. — Thorongil

I don't understand how that is a refutation. Adoption might be less egotistical. But that doesn't mean procreation is consequently egotistical.

So you really didn't deal with my argument - that even pre-conception, a reason for having kids is that you could expect it would make you less egotistical as a result. The desire to be less selfish could be a valid reason.

Quality. And one is too many. It's an argument from principle, as I said. — Thorongil

Right. So antinatalism relies on moral absolutism as I said. It doesn't even leave room to value the possibility of a growth in civilised selfhood. It is monotonic and obsessive in its complaints.

It does follow its own particular logic to its end, but that remains - in my view, based on larger naturalistic arguments - a caricature of the rich world it pretends to represent.

Yes, but not metaphysical wounds! — Thorongil

Ah yes. The completely imaginary kind!

So again, if naturalism is true, antinatalism fails. Nothing has really changed. We just have to decide whose metaphysics we believe.

Poppycock, I say. But if you really believe this, then you implicitly allow antinatalism in through the backdoor, for if morality is inherently subjective, you have no means of disputing the antinatalist on moral grounds. — Thorongil

Huh? I'm not disputing your moral right to hold absolutist antinatalist beliefs. I'm saying such beliefs would be no better than faith based. They would be utterly subjective.

My view of morality is instead based on the objectivity of pragmatic naturalism. So sure, that is a metaphysical stance. But it is the product of theory and evidence, not faith. It is the objective view in exactly the way pragmatism defines that.

Remember what I said about necessity vs contingency. There is room in my naturalism for actions that make no essential difference. Objectively the world is divided in that fashion. And so yes, there is a cultural relativism that makes many things - like choice of sock colour - a "subjective" matter.

But pre-conception choices about whether or not to have kids is a bit more important than sock colours. There will always be pros and cons. And so the hope is that a civilised world will make civilised decisions.

Faith-based approaches can indeed enshrine social habits that represent good choices. Religions exist in human society for a reason. Their absolutism is useful - if the habits they dictate continue to be functional.

But strong conviction of itself is not a reliable guide to metaphysical-strength issues. We invented the rational collective method of philosophy and science for precisely that reason.

This is a post-natal contingency. I'm talking about the selfishness of procreation itself, not the possible lack thereof as a result of having children. Besides, if this is true, then one can simply adopt, so you still haven't said anything about procreation proper. — Thorongil

Not a good argument. To procreate is to have kids. But perhaps you are not seeing it from a mother's point of view. The male can pretend it is all rather more abstract.

And adoption might be even more selfless than procreation. But my argument did target procreation - actual "proper" procreation. So you are simply trying to divert.

But to paraphrase schopenhauer1, by having children you are creating a state of affairs whereby more people will need to be civilized, when they didn't need to be civilized in the first place by never having been born. — Thorongil

Is it quality or quantity that is the issue here? How many is too many? How few is enough?

Antinatalism has to be an argument about quality - absolute generality. Either there should be life (because it is in some sense generally good, or at least neutral), of there should not.

But if antinatalism is simply a wrangle about the pragmatics of how many lives can exist in a tolerable fashion, then it has completely lost any real force it thought it had. Once you say some number is acceptable, then we can all agree - nothing to see here.

To procreate for the sake of the band-aid is therefore irrational, as the band-aid only exists to heal the wound, which it can't ever completely do. — Thorongil

Now we are into the last resort - philosophical battle by dramatic rhetoric. Existence is the wound that can't be healed.

I dunno. Maybe I spend too much time on actual biology. In nature, wounds heal. And they are the exception rather than the rule. The functional autonomy of a working body comes first. You can't have a wound without there being the alternative of the healthy organism.

antinatalism tacitly assumes moral realism, for it regards procreation as immoral in principle — Thorongil

Well exactly. It requires the absolutism of moral realism, as I said.

And some folk believe that. Which makes antinatalism another religion. In the face of all the evidence to the contrary about nature, it requires an act of faith to sustain antinatalism as a system of belief.

Some religions like to be life-affirming. Others might not.

To the degree that any religion shapes a society, those beliefs get a good evolutionary work-out. Nature still gets the last say on human death cults.

none of it is relevant to this single question: did the son follow a procedure that is effective in achieving the goal of getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

You've lost me. How could that have been the gist of your argument?

Are you claiming convenience store robbery is another trade - an actual kind of job, a recognised way to earn money? If so, then - duh. The son is right ... if the social norm indeed doesn't make the distinction that theft is something different from other forms of earning a crust.

But the father wanted the son to earn some money by getting a job. (Well, I'm guessing that as you left it open - the father could have had the more general goal of his son being a responsible and self-sufficient citizen.)

And now the son is justifying his flouting of that norm - respectable paid labour. But is theft truly effective even if the goal is merely money?

Is theft effective simply if you don't get caught? Is theft effective to the degree society can afford to tolerate it as something that doesn't make a difference? Is theft effective in some generic pragmatic sense as your claim, or his justification, is that the only real constraint is some abstract morality that pretends to have an objective base ... and actually, there is no such morality?

...effectiveness at achieving the higher goal does not pass through to the lower. — Srap Tasmaner

That may or may not be the case. Hierarchy theory accounts for both the underlying spatiotemporal continuities and discontinuities here. I've already done a length post on the issue.

So for example, neither the father nor the son can invent perpetual motion machines. The second law prevails on that generic score. But in a complex modern society, living off the free lunch of fossil fuels, the son will have access to the combination of guns, cars and convenience stores.

Locally, the laws of thermodynamics will appear to have no constraint on the son's socially-situated freedoms - until climate change kicks in and collapses the little bubble of modern economic dilemmas that your morality tale is entirely predicated on.

The pattern here is similar: reinterpret the instruction to shelve everything as an instruction to leave nothing in the back. Reinterpret the instruction to get a job as an instruction to get money. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. This is exactly how humans rationalise their moral choices. As if they were poorly programmed robots.

I will simply note how you were forced to admit to the role of interpretance by arguing for acts of re-interpretance.

Yes. Social engagement is all about this kind of semiotics. It is all about claiming the high moral ground to justify your particular choices of action. So there is negotiation and manoeuvring to create exactly what I have been describing - the larger contexts that frame the local particulars. Do that and the outcomes look natural, effective, optimal, legitimate, worthy, to all concerned.

So you are making my case for me.

The right way to think about all these situations is the natural one of a hierarchical order. We have to show how our individual behaviour - our personal degrees of freedom - fit naturally into a general social context. We have to show how in some generalised way, we are working within the constraints given by our worlds. And our actions are at their best when they can be shown to be a part of continually maintaining and reconstructing that said world.

Which doesn't meant that that also leaves considerable scope for personal actions which are simply contingent or accidental. If I wear red socks or blue socks is the kind of choice that doesn't matter - outside the constraints of a school uniform or other social norms of taste and convention.

So there is stuff we do because we believe it is part of the preservation of the very order that shapes us. We seek to be pro-social, being the products of sociality.

And there is stuff that we do that probably matters to no one because it doesn't matter to society in general. It becomes the random shit.

But your examples seem to want to confuse the two. Differences that matter - like paid labour vs theft - are treated as differences which don't.

And yes, they might not matter. They might be random shit according to social norms. But you haven't shown that in your examples.

Consequently, I want to understand what positive reasons there are to have children, specifically those that are not based in egotism. — Thorongil

Don't kids give you a reason not to be selfish? Aren't they an antidote to egotism?

So I don't think there needs to be moral grounds for procreation as such, any more than that it could be objectively or absolutely judged as immoral. If it works, it works. So really we are talking about the practicalities or optimalities, the degree of free choice involve.

But if your concern is primarily the "sin" of egotism, then having kids must be a major way of ensuring your life must be less self-centred.

Of course, the routine rejoinder is that kids are an expression of egotism in being an unwarranted extension of yourself.

But then I would counter-argue that selfhood is essentially social anyway. Humans evolved to be social creatures. It is always going to be the case that we find ourselves in others.

Or at least, it is a business of co-construction. And antinatalism's flaw is this mistaken understanding about the socially-constructed nature of selfhood.

But is civilization an end in itself? I think not. — Thorongil

Why not? If you are making moral arguments here, why isn't a civilised self a better self?

Now we can certainly say the current state of modern society has a bunch of problems. However that in turn means it is not yet properly civilised and so not at any kind of end.

So antinatalism would depend on being able to show that things can only get worse as the human story continues to evolve. But is that judgement factual?

Secular natalists and parents are therefore on the thinnest ice of all when it comes to reasons to procreate. — Thorongil

But then secular thinkers would have the least need of reasons here. They would just do what comes naturally - which includes making fairly rational choices about the situational pros and cons of having kids.

So to the degree that things like contraception, economics and social tolerance of diversity make procreation now an individual choice, people would exercise that choice.

Are there arguments - from a secular viewpoint - that would say the development of such a choice is wrong? It may indeed be a very difficult choice, given the uncertainties of modern life. But then that just emphasises the need for the kind of civilised rationality that would underpin such a choice.

So I would reply that a secular thinker - someone relying on rationality and evidence to make decisions about what is natural, even if just for themselves in some social context - is best placed to actually reason for or against having kids.

there's no such thing as generic effectiveness — Srap Tasmaner

Well there is in physics. You have the principle of least action which pretty much explains everything. Nature is ruled by optimality when it comes to the breaking of symmetries.

So natural selection is an expression of this at the level of biology. And the second law is its expression at the level of thermodynamics.

Along with its complementary causal principle - the principle of locality - it is as basic to the metaphysics of physics as you can get.

Example: father tells his son he needs to get a job; son goes out and robs a convenience store. When the father objects, the son's defence is that the whole point of getting a job was to get money, so he just got money a different way. Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

You are taking the Jamesian utilitarian view of Pragmatism it seems - the one Peirce had to disown.

But OK. We can zoom right in on some microcosmic example of exceptional complexity in this Universe. We can take some man, some son, at some arbitrary point in history where there are such things as convenience stores to rob when a desirable job appears hard to find.

Are you saying that I couldn't find any grand metaphysical narrative that would show this to be a particular example of a general principle? Is there something that just rules off this episode from the greater history of the Comos? Or are you too invoking exactly the semiotic/hierarchical distancing effects that I myself have already outlined?

Semiotically, what is going on between father and son - given that this could even be a realistic conversation out in the actual world?

On your version - when forced to provide an intelligible rationale of the context in play - the son says it is all about the least action path to get that money. Jobs and robbery are not meaningfully distinct ... despite social norms that exist because of a larger scale social effectiveness. In the son's view, the father's attempt to draw a distinction is a quite arbitrary one on his own personal scale of being. Jobs or robbery is being claimed as a difference that should make no difference.

So there is nothing about your example that doesn't directly relate to the systems approach I've been taking.

Complexity wants to build up critical distinctions or constraints to provide globally effective order. Simplicity wants to break down any such distinctions that instead stand in the way of a maximal flow.

These kinds of tensions or dynamics are the bread and butter of modern complexity modelling. Stewart and Cohen did a nice little book on it - The Collapse of Chaos - that highlighted the dichotomous or complementary nature of this kind of thing. They said it was about the opposition of simplexity and complicity. These days, for the real maths, you have stuff like constructal theory.

So you could model the prevalence of employment vs crime in terms of global social efficiencies. Why not? Cheaters vs co-operators is a huge field in evolutionary biology. It is an obvious thing that the issue in play is the cost of preventing system "friction" vs that of building the distinctions that would prevent it.

So I'm wondering what task you have in mind when you reference this pragmatic sense of effectiveness, and whose task it is. Does this task belong to the "we" you reference, or to the cosmos? — Srap Tasmaner

Well I am taking the pan-semiotic view that does treat the second law as an expression of cosmic purpose. Or more strictly speaking, I would argue for Stan Salthe's tripartite nested hierarchy of
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.

So the "we" that is the global constraint being expressed by the Cosmos is the teleomatic level thing of a generalised propensity or tendency. There is both finality in play - entropification as a "desire" is fundamental. But also the telos is appropriately watered down. The mind that has it as a goal is the very least kind of mind with a goal that we can physically imagine. Nothing weird is being claimed. All that is being asserted is a unity of nature where purpose can be expressed over every scale of being.

Then the "we" that should apply in your example becomes the social norms in play. A son that robs convenience stores is far more likely to come from a family and neighbourhood that robs convenience stores. The choice of a least action path to a goal would not really need much further justification.

But given your scenario, the father would be asserting some larger social norm as the "we" with the view on what is effective for that "we". We are law abiding and employed as that is a desire embedded at a cultural level, representing whatever happens to be functionally effective as a generalised habit.

Having developed your system, the only thing you seem to be able to do with it is find it in everything.

But it is a system derived from the evidence. It is a system derived by others. It is a system with a pedigree as old as metaphysics itself. It is a system derived as a challenge to the now mainstream system.

You are anti systems. And that has become your system. You certainly haven’t offered any critique of my system as a system.

So you are no longer content with the idea that substantial being is definitely both material cause and formal cause? It would have to be now either the one or the other?

Curious.

so let me be cheeky, then: I do believe I've touched a chord. — csalisbury

I can see you hoped to, but honestly I was hoping for a better organised challenge to my position.

Again, you didn't make an argument against a triadic metaphysics in terms of some definite alternative. You didn't make an argument against my version of anti-foundationalism - one that founds itself on the commonality of a core (semiotic) structure or relation. Etc, etc.

Finally, the engine quote. I was clearly, I thought, suggesting that the search for a foundation is flawed, substrate or engine. I wasn't avoiding responding. — csalisbury

Yeah. So I replied that "engine" is right in the sense that semiotics is a core structural relation. And then I was waiting for the argument of why something I claim makes a metaphysical difference, doesn't in your view make a difference.

We can both agree that there ain't the kind of material foundation that reductionism/atomism needs to presume. But if everything is bound and totalised by something as "insubstantial" as a common emergent structure, then how does your pluralism - in all its ill-defined glory, of course - fare against my totalising project there?

Where did semiotics and its triadic sign relation fail precisely? You never said.

What you did repeat was that any bid at abstract totalising must by its own lights fail to capture the wholeness of an actual world.

Well again, I made the arguments on that. I agreed that modelling is modelling. But then the larger Peircean story is that modelling constructs its own world. And so the actualised wholeness is itself an emergent from the core semiotic process that is the engine producing any reality.

It should be a familiar line - Plato's allegory of the cave. But rather more sophisicated - not least in taking quantum mechanics seriously. The Cosmos only appears to be solidly there because it is - in some literal sense - observing itself. It exists as a globalised matrix of constraints on undirected local possibility.

Now the rejoinder is obvious. Quantum mechanics doesn't account for human feelings.

But I made the argument there too. Semiotics originated in phenomenology. It is rooted in the mechanics of human intelligibility. So it doesn't exactly leave the phenomenal out of it. Instead it accepts the full Kantian force of that and then builds back out so as to recover the noumenal - rescuing it via this idea of a core relational structure that acconts for intelligibility itself.

I can see the vulnerability that creates. Yes, we are projecting a view of ourselves as rational beings on to the apparent rational structure we see in the world. That is quite a leap of faith.

However - pragmatism again - suck it and see. Leaps of faith become justified to the extent they appear to work.

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.

Your reply again may be that it is unwarranted for me to expect you to frame your response in terms that might appear to legitimate my framing of the issues in that fashion. Your actual position here is the position against all positions.

But I pointed out that is itself still a position. So why even pretend to engage if you want to be self-consistent to your position of not holding a position?

(Prediction: by now your position has become that you don't have a position on whether you do or don't hold positions ... and so we have arrived at the utter vagueness that is also foundational to my anti-foundationalist position.)

((Yes, in all earnestness, I really am having a laugh by now.))

You're ad homing me again rather than addressing my arguments.

These are the direct questions which you failed to respond to....

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why? — apokrisis

So first you diverted to the old switcheroo - I have to characterize my position in terms of yours ... to the degree that you do or don't have an expressed position.

And then you retreated to the comfortable histrionics of playing the victim.

What you didn't do was take the opportunity to show where this supposed agreement between us has emerged.

I mean the personal comments are fun and all. They spice it up. But they are not the main dish are they?

Do you see that right now you’re asking me to characterize my position in terms of yours? — csalisbury

LOL.

What you need to do now is show why my consideration was wrong — csalisbury

Double LOL.

As far as I can make out, your position is that you have no position. Hence pluralism is your position.

And that somehow makes this gambit of a position that ain't a position somehow unassailable by the very fact I take a position on position-taking as an epistemic process.

So you get to curl up tight like a hedgehog and complain that I won't come out to play.

Probably run its course then?

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them. — csalisbury

Well, tell me what it is that you accept about a global, triapartite, holism exactly. Give an example of how it applies here.

What I've been addressing is this:

So, for instance, the whole Pierce triadic thing .... what stops me from saying this procedure is as infected, at heart, as the atomist thing? It wants to find the base of everything - then it thought a while and said, well, not the base, but the engine. But it still is driven toward the central thing, even if the central thing is a weird triadic relationship. — csalisbury

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why?

So again: "What you have here is a prediction that can't fail, structurally. What would it mean for this prediction to fail?" — csalisbury

Huh? A generality is a constraint - that which defines a level of indifference to exceptions. So what Pragmatism says is not this atomistic notion - a single exception breaks the rule. Instead it says that exceptions are going to be the case. They are indeed ... predicted. But the prediction is about significance. A good generalisation is fault tolerant as it knows how to write off variability as accidents or contingencies. Stuff that doesn't matter in the bigger picture. Noise rather than signal.

So the falsification is about creating a state of expectation which is then alert to what would be a significant failure of deterministic prediction. What kind of exceptions are just the expected statistical noise and what would be in fact paradigm-shifting level failures.

So now the falsification lifts to a meta-evidential level. Does reductionism let us down enough to worry? Is holism a better kind of generalisation - and what could then rightfully challenge it?

Well holism would be challenged by the success of reductionism for a start. And that is how history went. Holism has been around from the start of metaphysics (see Anaximander or Heraclitus). But it lost out for a long time to atomism and reductionism.

However now the limits of a reductionist metaphysics are clearly being reached. See quantum mechanics especially. And so we are getting the resurgence of a full-blown holism - starting in biology and the social sciences back in the 1950s, becoming the norm through the more recent rapid advances in the physics of complexity and self-organising systems.

Then even within holism or systems science - which are actually very diverse fields when viewed from the inside - there is a contest of ideas or paradigms.

For example, what I've called SX out on is that he is on the side of the holists with things like dynamical systems theory or autopoiesis, but then there is the more encompassing holism of Peircean sign relations and infodynamics/hierarchy theory.

So as a contest of ideas, holism has many camps. And it is a frontier field only to the degree it has that dynamical uncertainty. And it can be criticised for being insufficiently general in its mathematical structures. It is still rather a rag-bag collection of mathematical-strength models. Although, having been through a few convulsions like cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, holography, etc, etc, all the particular models are becoming more recognisable by the generality of what connects them. It is now much clearer how systems modellers are all feeling parts of the same elephant.

But again, the very way you frame your demand for falsification speaks to your essentially atomistic outlook.

Pragmatism - of the Peircean kind - stresses that not all exceptions are equal. Some are meaningful, some merely accidents. So as an epistemology, the ability to know the difference is something itself that has to be built into the totalising model.

Now mostly the deciding line is treated as an issue of heuristics. Every discipline learns to make is historically conditioned judgements.

But I have been arguing for a larger model - one based on the triadicism of hierarchy theory. So if we can produce a mathematical model of generality vs particularity itself, then we are getting somewhere.

Again, in previous posts, I highlighted the essential flip in mindset this requires.

The old epistemic question was what fluctuation would be sufficient to disrupt my general paradigm? That was how Popperian falsification was understood. What kind of exception would it take to break your stable belief (about a stable world)?

But the new science of complexity sees reality the other way round. Now the question is what generality can survive the relentless instability of fluctuations? What kind of exceptions can your generality tolerate by ignoring them as meaningless noise ... just as reality itself would have to be able to achieve a dynamical equilibrium by no longer being disrupted by its constant disruptions.

So you keep attacking me for forcing an organising viewpoint on a highly various and contingent social reality. It is obviously bad practice - from your chosen metaphysical paradigm.

But what I am doing is saying that reality itself is organised by its generalities. And so organising our conceptions of the world in this fashion - finding the logic that organises everything to the point of treating exceptions as noise - is in fact simply the epistemology accurately tracking the ontology.

Our minds should work that way, as that is the way reality works.