That's right, it's only a part of knowledge. But is there any belief apart from fallabilistic knowledge? Or to put it another way, don't we say that we believe rather than say that we know, only where there is some doubt? And is it not the case that doubt is relevant only in the context of fallibilistic knowledge? — Janus

Language takes belief and doubt to another (semiotic) level.

It is personal and unvoiced in animals. It may be there as part of cognition, but it not present in some depersonalised and metacognitive sense.

Then along comes language and belief~doubt can be socially constructed to achieve cultural purposes. There is a medium to make its cognitive mechanism something explicit and communal.

So as usual in any debate, views founder on accounting for the emergent discontinuity while maintaining also the underlying continuity. Once we were animals. And now we are still animals - but linguistically structured all the way down in a fashion that makes a big psychological difference.

LSD flashback. Banno meets Timothy Leary. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hah no. Just a flashback to undergrad cognitive science.

Even then it was astounding that Fodorian language of thought nonsense was such a bandwagon. An embodied or semiotic view - what Banno seems to be calling externalism - was already obvious.

But you did have to scratch around to connect the dots on that.

On the general issue of how to view laws, John Wheeler was articulating a quantum information approach very nicely back in the 1980s.

This is a good short paper - INFORMATION, PHYSICS, QUANTUM: THE SEARCH FOR LINKS
John Archibald Wheeler - http://cqi.inf.usi.ch/qic/wheeler.pdf

And the longer version - https://what-buddha-said.net/library/pdfs/wheeler_law_without_law.pdf

The opening statement for instance...

“Every law of physics, pushed to the extreme, will be found to be statistical and approximate, not mathematically perfect and precise,”

So the tricky bit here is that an emergentist approach to physical reality must take a constraints-based approach where the Cosmos arises due to a suppression of its freedoms. This makes the Universe a fundamentally probabilistic exercise. If we zoom in on the "ground of being", we discover only increasingly uncertain fluctuations. There just isn't anything fixed and definite in the way that a story of eternal natural laws operating on fixed initial conditions would seem to demand.

So that appears to support SX's political desire for a PoMo metaphysics of radical contingency. There is nothing God-given about how things should be. The laws themselves dissolve into quantum mush as you put them under the microscope.

However that is half the story. The other half is about the order that must arise if a chaotic mess of fluctuations is also in interaction. If there are correlations between events, then patterns will emerge as organising regularities. And mathematical models - of probabilistic ensembles - show the inevitability of the emergence of this kind of global or macroscopic order.

There might be no law, no limitations at the microscale, but laws or limits are what emerge in predictable fashion at the macroscale. A classical determinism is what finds its full expression as a fact of a process of development.

Breaking a symmetry is just the first step. Once a system has started down that road, it is going to keep going to the end (what is to stop it?). And so the macroscale limit is a system in a state that is fully broken - asymmetric in a fully homogenous fashion. Or one that has arrived at its final resting equilibrium state, as they say.

So modern physics has an emergentist ontology where reality is about "laws" that develop in a succession of increasingly more particularised global constraints. And what characterises a natural law, as opposed to some local "non-holonomic" constraint, is that it applies everywhere equally in the Universe.

But also - the new thing - is that this cascade of symmetry breakings unfolds in time ... as the Cosmos cools and expands. So the ontology is developmental and not existential. We can talk about particle mass before the electro-weak symmetry breaking for example. But that is also a somewhat meaningless concept because before that transition, there was no effective Higgs field to quantify that mass - make "massive" particles actually subject to the gravitational effects of being heavy or light.

Thus laws about massive particles - ones that have to fly along at less than light speed, with all the further symmetry-breaking implications of that - are both universal ... now ... and also merely emergent ... back at some particular time. Early on in the Big Bang, those further constraints were both a mathematical inevitabilty but also only latent as a potential. As "the law", they did not yet exist.

So this Peircean approach - a Cosmos that evolves a regularity of habits due to the inevitability that to exist involves the necessity of a univocal or global intelligibility - is at the heart of a modern scientific approach to Creation.

And Wheeler - back in the 1980s - was pretty clear about the pan-semiotic direction things needed to go. The ground of existence is a relational network of interactions. Quantum information. The questions reality can ask of itself to give itself classical definiteness ... and then the limits to that which are the source of all the quantum "weirdness".

This report reviews what quantum physics and information theory have to tell us about the age-old question, How come existence? No escape is evident from four conclusions:

(1) The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any preestablished continuum physical law.

(2) There is no such thing at the microscopic level as space or time or spacetime continuum.

(3) The familiar probability function or functional, and wave equation or functional wave equation, of standard quantum theory provide mere continuum idealizations and by reason of this circumstance conceal the information-theoretic source from which they derive.

(4) No element in the description of physics shows itself as closer to primordial than the elementary quantum phenomenon, that is, the elementary device-intermediated act of posing a yes-no physical question and eliciting an answer or, in brief, the elementary act of observer-participancy.

Otherwise stated, every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.

the 'fundamental laws' are, ironically, more exceptions than rules, limits cases and not paradigmatic ones. That the fundamental laws of physics are taken to be paradigmatic of science - and that people are so taken by promises of 'theories of everything' - speaks more to the vampirism and the hangover of unconscious and powerful religious impulses than it does about the real life practices of science. — StreetlightX

Again you go too far and try to assimilate philosophy of science to a social agenda. Let the facts speak for themselves here.

The fundamental laws are fundamental because they take us back to the beginning. If the Cosmos evolved, there has to have been an initial state of high symmetry that then became the current succession of increasingly broken symmetries.

So physics has found - as a central fact - that our Universe appeared in a "Big Bang" and is heading for a "Heat Death". All the individuation we see is the result of symmetries that got broken. These symmetries have the force of mathematical necessity. We found them first via mathematical reasoning. Later it was realised that Nature itself had to be bound by this principle of self-consistent intelligibility and a generalised least action principle.

If science thus fills a hole left by theistic metaphysics, it is because it has shown there was indeed a creation event that was deeply mathematical. The order we see could not have failed to be the case as the simplest form of order that could have developed.

Of course there are a lot of gaps in this story still. Ideally a theory of everything would be able to explain the value of all the initial conditions constants as mathematical necessities. The strengths of the various coupling forces are "accidents" so far as current understanding is concerned. But it is also reasonable speculation that those constants are also mathematically determined by the exact detail of complex symmetry breakings.

So really, scientific excitement about theories of everything which reveal existence to have inevitable mathematical-strength structure is not misplaced. Our descriptions of the fundamental structure of nature is quite the opposite of talk about exceptions. The ontic structure described in terms of symmetry models is as real and central as anything could be. With luck, we will find there could have only been only the one Cosmos at a fundamental level. And that would make it a univocal metaphysics in which exceptions become impossible.

Yes. That outcome might also delight those with a different social or philosophical agenda to your own. But so what?

Unless you believe scientific inquiry ought to be constrained by a quasi-political agenda - making things come out right for pluralism, social constructionism, political correctness, or whatever, at a fundamental physical level - then the science should be left to speak for its own metaphysics.

That physics should have discovered the Cosmos was in fact created, and that its development was already pre-ordained by mathematical-strength principles, is just something philosophy has to get used to.

It is not about filling a hole left by religion. It is about completing a metaphysical project initiated by the Ancient Greek metaphysicians even before the theocrats came along and started nicking their ideas in an attempt to legitimate their various brands of Church.

So either nothing is mindful or everything is mindful. And those two options exhaust the choices?

Well nope.

If instead you are saying panpsychism and eliminative materialism are pretty equivalent in their degree of essential incoherency, then maybe yes. :)

So do you reject panpsychism as not even a coherent theory? Can we be clear on that.

Good lord! The 1970s just flashed before my eyes.

Nonetheless: I think one can grant Cartwright's point - that the laws in general are 'untrue' in the vast majority of cases - without for all that claiming that the laws themselves are 'false'. — StreetlightX

Still an attention getting move more than a reasonable stance. But then outside of philosophy of science, many might think science tells the transcendent truths of reality.

It's a difficult one. :)

In the second sense of truth is basically this: are the laws otherwise than what we have discovered? The answer is no. It is true that F=ma, and not F=ma^2. On the other hand, it is not true that F=ma accurately and precisely describes the bahaviour of most moving bodies. These senses of truth are not in contradiction, because they bear on different domains, or rather, they attempt to respond to different questions (It is an accurate description vs. Is the law otherwise than stated?). The strangeness and unease which might accompany Cartwright's insistence on the 'untruth' of the laws stems from conflating - in a way Cartwright does not - these two uses of truth. — StreetlightX

I don't think that is it at all.

The point - as you said - is that laws are simply descriptions of prevailing constraints. They don't need to be exception-less. Indeed, if reality itself is inherently probabilistic at a fundamental level, then they couldn't be. The laws themselves could only capture the strong probabilities of a Universe that has been around long enough to develop a history of well-regulated habit.

So a law like F=ma is a limit state expression. In an ideal world with nothing to individuate the circumstance, it would apply. But every actual situation is a mess of some particular local history. There are all sorts of other causal influences that could impact on the behaviour of things - create the apparent exceptions.

Newton's laws of course themselves presumed an already constrained world - one that was geometrically flat and where energy scale did not affect the picture. New even more abstract laws were framed to allow the Newtonian cosmos to be viewed as now the special case - flat rather than curved, with its tendency to fluctuations suppressed by it having become so classically cold and expanded.

So the truth-telling is about a hierarchy of constraints. What it gets right is how much of the backdrop that gets taken for granted as the frame of reference is itself turned into a model with fewer constraints and so a need for more symmetry-breaking measurements.

Science is an art that balances the two kinds of information - the modelling and the measuring, the laws and the initial conditions. There is no truth to be discovered so much as that we have to make some pragmatic trade-off which works.

So I disagree with your account in this regard. What you are saying amounts to having to decide if an "accurate description" is to be found in the theory or its measurements? Clearly, the accuracy is a combination of some appropriate level of trade-off. It is how the two work together in practice. This is what needs to be emphasised.

Both cost us an effort. We want to strike the balance that describes the world with the least information. And while you can write F=ma on a t-shirt, do you want to have to measure the state of every individual particle to know what is going on in a complex system?

So "untruth" is really only ever "unefficiency". Even a really bad theory could be acceptable if we are willing to treat every exception as something to be individually explained by some excuse. That's how religion deals with the irregularity of miracles, or psychics with the erratic nature of their forecasts.

In other words, this harking on about truth or veracity shows the grip of another age. We should be more use to pragmatism by now. However that in turn - in being based on a hierarchically-organised constraints-based logic - stands against certain other philosophical leanings.

It is just as wrong to say laws are merely convenient descriptions as to say they are actual truths. That way lies an argument for strong social constructionism.

Pragmatism has to stand in the tricky space between these two extremes. Laws may be just descriptions, but they are also optimal in some way that actually reflects the hierarchical and constraints-based facts of the world. The structure of existence is out there. The exceptionality of nature is being suppressed by its own accumulating history. And science - as an epistemic structure - works best when it adopts the same logic.

There's a point to be made about how this very nicely captures a Wittgenstienian take on truth - in which truth is what we do with it - but that's perhaps for another thread. — StreetlightX

Exactly what I fear. All this is slanted towards the support of strong PoMo relativism. Out goes the baby with the bathwater as usual.

But I made sure to label the pain I am concerned with as "torturous" pain. — darthbarracuda

Yes. So pain that is "meaningless" as a spur to action as you are adding that there is no means of escaping its source.

But doesn't that shift the "evil" to whatever it is that makes escape impossible. So it is not the pain as such. It is the torturer - and the degree to which you would assign moral agency to that entity.

I find it impossible to not see something like, say, the Holocaust, or an antelope being hunted for sport, as anything but evil. — darthbarracuda

OK. But you see how you have shifted from pain being bad to the sources of pain possibly being reprehensible. And so likewise the remedy shifts.

Can we do something about Holocausts and antelope being hunted for sport? Of course. So is the evil an irredeemable aspect of existence itself? You are not showing that.

This is what I'm complaining about. You don't seem prepared to make a proper argument. You talk about the effect as if it has no cause - no reasons. You attempt to close down a proper discussion by calling the pain itself an irredeemable evil. And then from that faulty premise, you will draw the familiar anti-natalist truths.

That torturous pain, an unconditional evil, — darthbarracuda

What make a pain an evil exactly?

I agree pain ain't nice. It could be the most unpleasant thing ever. But why an evil? I presume you aren't just being hyperbolic in your language but can justify this apparently transcendent and rather black and white judgement.

From a biological point of view, a little bit of pain or suffering is a necessity and even a good. It's a normal part of life. We have to evaluate how things are in our relation with the world.

But aren't you introducing a false step where you talk about pain as simply an evil? You are now making an ontic leap from an issue of relativity - pains which are a useful biological signal that eventually become useless signals when we are finally trapped in the jaws of a lion or a mangled car wreck - to a claim that pain just is ... an unconditional evil.

The biological view would be the bad of pain is always conditional on the realistic possibility of an action that would bring its relief. You seem to have abandoned that naturalism. So do you have an ontological-strength justification or are you merely being rhetorical?

It seems likely that an ideological battle will take place on the world’s stage, pitting a “retreating” liberal democracy against China’s growing one-party autocracy, the latter of which will make increased gains in influencing and exporting its political model on developing countries, or to be copied by political parties within developed countries. — Maw

I'm not sure you've got the psychology of it quite right. The point made to me when I was meeting some of Taiwan's top China watchers - who really need to know - is that China's leaders have a greater historic fear of the potential for internal rebellion. If the people rise up, that's quite a lot of people.

So the US was founded on one kind of mythology - the endless frontier. China is instead a belief in an insular empire that had a bad century or two and now is getting back to how things should rightfully be.

Against these two identity myths, you have the realities of runaway consumerist economics and the environmental limits to that lifestyle model.

Any ideology is running smack into that as its actual challenge. And the problem is the degree to which either country can look past its past and the sense of self that has developed through that.

You mention Belt and Road. It might be interesting to check out the recent doco on Jeremy Rifkin - The Third Industrial Revolution - on that. He claims to be the inspiration for both EU and China's strategic directions on a transition to a post-carbon economy.

The US - being the big winner of the second industrial revolution - is mired in its Trumpian agenda of "making America great again". Which simply means cranking up the fossil fuel monster that is already dying on its feet. Meanwhile Google, Facebook and the rest are allowed to run riot, untaxed and unregulated in Wild West fashion.

So yes. Ideologies count. The powers are mired in their pasts. But those are colliding with realities. In the end, there is only the one planet to go around. And the second industrial era model is as good as dead. Trumpish politics can only be a blip - although potentially a lethal one.

The EU and China certainly seem to understand each other at the level of sustainable economic models. And China's historic inward-focus likely frames the talk of dominance or world hegemony rather differently. It always knew it was the Empire surrounded by a rabble. Would it matter if it China-rised the US or the EU culturally? That is likely less of an issue with the Communists having so effectively erased so much of that past anyway.

I was referring to a dichotomy of views. Apparently you haven't noticed this: — Janus

Sure, but the dichotomous alternative to panpsychism is panzombieism or pandeadism. — Janus

So, the alternative scenarios (ignoring dualistic substance ontologies) as they are usually conceived are;

matter is alive and intelligent

matter is dead — Janus

Sure, you talked about dichotomies in terms of both epistemology and ontology. So there is the dichotomy between the model and the reality. And the model of the reality can be of the dichotomies that form reality. And then - the Peircean finale - the dichotomy of model and reality is essentially the semiotic dichotomy that is also the dichotomy that constructs reality.

So it is all connected and intertwined.

But I was addressing the form of your particular ontic claim here - that reality is composed of a substance that is either intrinsically alive/aware or, instead, dead/inert ... whatever that could truly mean.

I'm still waiting for a response on that. Saying that our ontologies are just themselves alternative views is a different issue.

Or rather, what I was saying was you were adopting an epistemology that relies on LEM-derived antinomies. A metaphysical dichotomy has a different dialectical logic. So now we are dealing with the meta-dichotomy of your essentially reductionist approach - a reduction of dualisms to monads - vs my essentially holist approach, where there is the opposite of an expansion towards a triadic or hierarchical systems model in play.

And elsewhere I have agreed that reductionism vs holism is a genuine epistemic dichotomy. They are the asymmetricisation of each other. They are complementary modes of inquiry in most ways. Each goes to its own extreme - one towards logical atomism, the other towards absolute contextuality.

But that is a sophisticated position to arrive at. And panpsychism is the very opposite of a sophisticated position. Which is what would make panzombieism or pandeadism just straw men, not serious alternative ontologies.

No, Apo - belief is a point of view. — Banno

Sure. "Truth" falls out of the picture as we realise there is only actually belief and its justification. We've established that already.

But then justification - why we ought to believe - brings us to the embodiment of some reason. We have to account for the "self" that is having the "point of view".

However carry on deflecting. Let's pretend truth hasn't dropped out of the picture as a transcendent presence which is "truly out there" - freely existent and detached from any point of view.

But that is not a dichotomy as it is one thing with two mutually exclusive properties. A dichotomy would be like location~momentum complementarity where matter has both irreducibly, but being constrained in one direction has material consequences for its partner property.

You are trying to say instead that matter has to have just one or the other in absolute fashion. Either it is universally alive or it is universally dead. And because we at least are alive, we can't then believe that the rest of existence can be dead. That is the panpsychic argument in a nutshell.

So technically, you are arguing by antinomy. You are insisting that the law of the excluded middle applies. That's different from a metaphysical dichotomy where the polar extremes become the complementary limits of existence.

If there is mind and there is matter, then neither themselves "really exist". All things could only tend towards one or other extreme. Neither aliveness nor deadness could be universal states in themselves. It is only their relativity that is present and real in the world.

And to make sense of that, we would have to be able to see the connection which makes that sound right. Which is pretty much the point of Peircean semiotics.

You can't arrive at a sensible pan-istic tale via a LEM argument. That is designed for reasoning about sets of absolute particulars, not metaphysical generalities. Before a binary logic of the either/or, we must begin with a justification of how the fact of binary possibility - pairs of opposing limits - could even arise within this one world that is Being. That is the critical step that you are missing and which panpsychism is set up to skirt.

The question - and it's not a small one - is what one ought believe. — Banno

Which circles the issue back around to defining this "one" that might ought to be doing anything at all.

Truth is a point of view. So that requires the two things which a theory of truth needs to account for. The facts of the matter, but also the imagined entity that would have some reason to care.

Despite being asked a gazillion times, you always go silent about this other side of the truth equation. And this seems tied into your desire simply to be able to assert truth without having to justify your "self". ;)

Sure, but the dichotomous alternative to panpsychism is panzombieism or pandeadism. — Janus

Well it can't be because we ourselves show that nature has its "psyche" bit. So the real problem for any pan-istic story is to actually enshrine a dichotomy which has some universality. Just trying to have it that everything is mindful is as non-explanatory as trying to have it everything lacks a mind. This kind of pan-ism is monadic and lacks a dichotomous distinction which would actually explain anything in terms of a mutual or complementary opposition.

So the more usual dichotomy would be between generalised simplicity and particular complexity. Mind is what you get when material structure is the least simple. Brains are highly negentropic structures, when compared to the highly entropic world in which they exist. So right there is a qualitative difference of a dichotomous nature we could investigate.

I of course argue for pan-semiosis as an ultimate metaphysics.

The difference between the living and the dead comes down to a semiotic or modelling relation. The mind is the brain modelling the world - a world in terms of a self being in it. A view which pretty much accounts for the meat of the OP. And so we can see there is a primal distinction based on information or symbol vs matter or dynamics. Mind arises as the information that regulates material dynamics in complex adaptive systems.

So we establish the dichotomy that separates the living and mindful material structures from the ones that are dead and unconscious. That dichotomy is enshrined in semiotics as a science.

Then the speculative venture - the bit that might connect everything up as a pan-istic whole - is to push this dichotomy of symbol and matter, information and dynamics, all the way down to the fundamental level of scientific description. Which happens to be where physics is at right now.

So there are rules to this game. A pan-istic metaphysics - a unity that ties everything in existence together with a nice bow - has to enshrine some fundamental dichotomy which also explains why this unity is a symmetry that is very breakable. The unity has to be a unity of opposites ... all the way down to the fundamental.

Panpsychism is failed metaphysics as it doesn't put forward such a tale. It sort of tries to at times. As with dual aspect monism. Matter is said to have both material properties and mental properties.

But this is not a real dichotomy. There is no sense in which the two are complementary and so formative of each other. It is a claim about two essentially unrelated things being housed in the same "atom". The smallest grain of matter contains the smallest drop of awareness. Nothing gets explained as there is no sense in which this brokenness is itself the breaking of a connecting symmetry. The brokenness becomes a brute and dualistic fact.

With the information~matter dichotomy on the other hand, it all arises from quantum complementarity. Physics has uncovered an exact relation between physical existence and knowledge uncertainty. The relation can be quantified or scaled in terms of the Planck constant.

So there is a way that pan-ism has to work. It must enshrine a dichotomy which expresses a fundamental complementarity that connects all the way down. It can't claim to arrive at a unifying monadism simply by pasting together two unrelated concepts, like a substance called matter and a substance called awareness (or soul, or spirit, or whatever).

Really powerful explanatory laws of the sort found in theoretical physics do not state the truth." — Cartwright

Fundamental laws abstract away all initial conditions. They are absolutely general because they carry no history and you get to plug that into the equations as some set of measurements.

Cartwright is making the point that laws are descriptions of constraints. They describe the physical context that impinges on material locales to give them shape as objects or events. And every material locale may have a complex history. The past will have built up a lot of surrounding information in the neighbouring environment which bears causally on what happens next.

A ball will run down a slope. That is a fairly simple example of a set of initial conditions. You could have a law of nature that describes this single situation. The law describes a certain ball, a certain slope, and a certain outcome that must always be seen if the situation is repeated. So the law is absolutely specific, but overloaded with that specificity. It is full of initial conditions descriptions. Physics wants to abstract away everything that is particular about this situation and simply have general laws of motion and gravity - the universal constraints on events - and let you then plug in all the locally special information about some specific history, some specific set of material constraints. Like the locations and characteristics of some ball, some slope.

So every event or object is embedded in a structure of causal relations. The whole thing has a history that individuated it. We then come along and analyse that using our dichotomy of model and measurement. We separate what is going on into general laws or the universe’s most general constraints, and initial conditions, or the universe’s most individual and particular constraints. Some ball and slope is understood as being general in having to be ruled by Newtonian laws, and particular in having their own angles and weights.

However Cartwright is getting carried away in saying the big laws don’t tell truths. That is philosophy of science rhetoric to get her distinctive position noticed.

But then neither is she the first to realise that this is how the “laws of nature” work.

The actual world is the sedimentation of all the symmetry breakings that create some actual state of history. We then need to unwind that context of constraints that impinges to individuate every material locale by making our rather artificial distinction between the most general possible universal rules and the most particular possible locally measured qualities.

The ideal physical theory is an equation that describes a universal symmetry in a state of brokenness - so like, E = mc^2. Then we go measure the particular mass, or energy, to see how it this constraint would relate it.

And to measure the mass of an object or event becomes a further story of constraints. We have to confine or isolate the supposed individual thing somehow. We have to decide when the measurement is accurate enough to give us all the information.

It is constraints all the way down. And measurement becomes an informal art, a matter of judgement and experience we learn to apply to individual cases. The human modeller with his abstracts laws has to re-enter the picture as a constructor or the constraints that fix the initial conditions.

This is where things get tricky in quantum mechanics, nonlinear mechanics, and anything dealing with emergent properties.

Seems we've only tried logic, although I suppose we do have other variants of the usual logic that people have proposed such as paraconsistent logic, relevance logic etc. — hymyíŕeyr

Well yes. Of course in fact logic is not one thing. A variety of approaches have been tried. So there is both something it all seems to boil down towards - the laws of thought as a basis for deductive argument - and also all the less constrained stuff that is a relaxation of that "limit state" absolutism.

Another angle on your justification question is that some logicians - especially CS Peirce and Spencer-Brown - sought to justify formal logic by using graphical arguments.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form

So set out as geometry, the truths of logic seem less deniable. A picture is worth a thousand words perhaps? :)

If you want to break out of the loop of using formal argument to support formal argumentation, then that is a way to tie logic to "existence" itself. Talking about the necessity of a relation is one thing - a rather abstract thing. But existential graphs show it as a necessity of any world with actual relations.

So the question is, how could we establish justification for the existence of logic and perhaps some of its core elements, such as the concept of truth values? — hymyíŕeyr

The justification is going to be ultimately informal and circular. We make our best guess and find that it seems to work out.

But then also, we do find something stronger. The results appear to have mathematical-strength inevitability. Looking back, it seems that the results can't have wound up different. Retrospectively, the laws of thought must have always been there waiting to be discovered in some Platonic ideal sense.

So logic is like maths in that they are habits of thought that not only work, but seem to be the only habits that could have worked and so were waiting to be found in some objective sense.

While we can thus still doubt the results, we also wind up with the least reason to doubt that we can imagine. Which is a good enough way to proceed.

Are they really or are they just protecting some belief they are attached to? — Janus

So where would that leave you and your true and honest subjective convictions? How could you deny them theirs?

Spinoza said "deus sive natura", "God or nature". I tend to think the same. Perhaps we don't fundamentally agree: but do you at least acknowledge that it is important to love something greater than ourselves? — Janus

Define God. Define love. Definitions will uncover your ontic commitments - to the degree that something definite stands behind the use of the terms.

I wouldn't myself talk about love as if it were something ontically foundation. I simply say that central to flourishing is not hating the world as it naturally is.

Likewise I wouldn't talk about it as being higher - transcendent. Rather I am talking about embracing it as being essentially part of "myself" - immanent. To reject nature - as it actually is - would be misguided.

So I don't think we can agree here. You want to believe an ontology that seems opposite in every important respect.

What really matters is what our experience is to us as it is experienced; what matters is what leads to heightening the felt quality of our lives, not arriving at some cold analysis of what our experience, our lives, are reducible to, or to what we take to be an objective explanation for their possibility. — Janus

I come across people who are passionately convinced about all sorts of things all the time - UFOs, gun ownership, Hollywood bearding conspiracies, you name it. If you think that the subjectivity of unanalysed "feelings" is the answer, and that objective analysis is not about a methodology for arriving at what is honest and truthful, then there is nothing more to discuss.

You argue according to your strength of conviction, I instead believe conviction arises once doubt lies demonstrably exhausted for all practical purposes. There is no common ground if you are to be believed.

Life warts and all is your God; — Janus

Except it is no sort of God. It is Nature. Please call it that. Let's not pretend to agree on what we fundamentally don't.

The infant's world is a world of indeterminate feeling before it is a world of cognition and perception. — Janus

Does the science support that view? For a human newborn, everything is pretty indeterminate in a phenomenological sense. Even to smile takes a few months to develop.

We know in the sense of being familiar with things; that is the basis of knowing. — Janus

Sure. I said that we need to be able to recognise stuff fits to also recognise when it doesn't. And both have a characteristic feel because both result in suitable physical preparatory responses. We can feel ourselves gearing up to approach or avoid, accept or reject, attend or ignore.

And when thinking at a linguistic level, we still have to bounce our thinking off this same basic neurobiology. We consider the idea and react with a match or mismatch response.

This should be obvious from the various meta-cognitive illusions that we might experience, like deja vu. We can feel conviction even when we know there oughtn't be.

Sure, but I don't argue for that. I say that, when it comes to metaphysical views or any viewpoint which cannot be rigorously inter-subjectively corroborated, we choose the ones we find most convincing, and that being convinced is really a matter of feeling. — Janus

But how does that deal with my reply that what we feel is easily manipulated by the way some matter is presented?

Sure, the feeling of being convinced is a genuine thing. We go aha!, all the bits fit. But it is not a reliable thing. Everyone has great insights on drugs or when they are half-asleep, but then the conviction slips away in the cold light of day.

So our brain has evolved to make reliable "gut instinct" judgements about what is familiar, what is suspect. And we continue to apply that to the imagined world we conjure up in our heads through language. Yet there is a large literature on cognitive biases to show how wrong gut instinct can be.

It is a long list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

The kind of "feeling" I am referring to is the desire for truth and intellectual honesty that enables you to see where you might be indulging in "confirmation bias". — Janus

But that goal of being objective and dispassionate is about as socially constructed as it gets. Believing in it is a product of modern culture, hardly the natural human condition. It is a social habit, a taught method, not a "feeling" that we find deeply buried underneath all the usual self-righteous, self-serving, ways of thought that might be more the human norm.

Why do we keep pointing back to the Ancient Greeks as our philosophical model? Did the Greeks suddenly evolve a neurobiology that set them apart from the Persians or Egyptians in this regard? Or did they accept a method?

The essence of any religion consists in loving God, however that God might be conceived. The experience of that love is the most enriching human experience possible, in my view. — Janus

All I can say is that this means nothing to me. My alternative would be to reply that the most enriching thing would be loving life, warts and all.

Also when I say feeling is fundamental to human experience I mean that it is the calibre and kind of feeling that predominates in a human life that determines the happiness, the overall tenor, of that life — Janus

I don't deny that. As I argue, cognition involves the production of the self along with the world. Our experience of the world is really our experience of ourselves in that world. We feel where the one stops and the other starts.

But I think you are relying on a loose definition of "feeling". Neurobiology tells us that the brain has an "emotional response" to whatever passes through the eye of attention. We react to whatever matters in every way we need to react. And that includes a lot of rapid changes in arousal and physiological set which then - in sensory fashion - feel like something to "us".

As these purposes not actually rooted in nature herself, they can only ever be fabricated or constructed. So what kind of resonance do they have with the cosmos at large? — Wayfarer

It comes back to our different metaphysical pictures of causality.

For me, there is "nothing" until the everythingness, the vagueness, of a potential is constrained. And so that makes "purpose" fundamental. A constraint must, by definition, express some kind of natural wish or tendency. So for reality to have some definite persistent character, there must be a good reason for that state of regulation to be in place.

You instead want to argue that purpose can't be found in the self-organisation of nature. For you, the presence of purposes is thus made a problem.

t's a pity that whenever certain subjects are broached, your attitude becomes so hostile. — Wayfarer

But anyway - please don't interpret this as 'an attack'. It's a been a useful exchange of views as far as I am concerned because it is really obliging me to spell out what I am saying. — Wayfarer

Hostile? You know I don't take it personally. I'm just arguing for my point of view. I don't see you as attacking me either. You are making as strong a case for an argument as you can. And I enjoy your online presence much more than many others because of that. You do stand up for your view with an actual argument. So I might attack your case, but I don't think anything negative about you. :)

Nor Janus, when it comes to that. He also is one of the more reasonable people here.

The point of the quote is that Nirvana is not a 'state of quiescent nothingness' (as to what it is, I don't think it has any analogy in science.) — Wayfarer

Well I quoted what it is not - not differentiated and yet still a state of being. And I would point out how that resembles the Western tradition of a substantial potential that tracks back to Anaximander's Apeiron and gets its thorough logical working out in Peirce's metaphysics of Vagueness.

And now physics itself has concrete models of vacuums being full of virtual particles that become manifest when relativistic constraints are applied. This kind of stuff can be calculated and observed these days.

So I stack up that against whatever woolly non-theory you might propose by way of a metaphysical orientation.

It's about what is effective in an instrumental or utilitarian sense. — Wayfarer

Well if you include social and cultural utility in that pragmatic equation, then yes. And why not?

The Peircean position is that scientific reasoning gives us the answer that a community of inquiry would agree to in the long run, if no needless barriers are put in its way. So the third person perspective is not the objectivity of naive realism. It is the collective view of a set of like-minded inquirers following the three logical steps of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation.

So it is a method rooted in the purposes of those who have a reason to be interested.

And as such, it recognises the essentially socially-constructed nature of human knowledge. Thus it is obviously the right way to go about things if social and cultural utility are the highest intellectual goods. The collective mind collectively constructs itself through an open-ended process of reasoned inquiry.

What the individual thinks, standing alone, drops out of the picture as how could any isolated mind figure anything useful out if the mind itself is a collective social phenomenon?

That is why I say the Romantic model of man - the one that urges us to look inwards to our individual essence to find our transcendent connection to some "higher mind" - is a load of damaging guff. It gets in the way of understanding our true nature. It is a brake on the development of the higher state of socially-constructed consciousness that we need to get to.

So your argument is that Scientism blinds us to the higher issues. And my reply - from a natural philosophy stance - is that a higher self is what we humans have a social and cultural responsibility to invent. Science - being the reasoning method applied in best collective fashion - has to be the basis of any real advance on the very issues which you say matter the most.

'Sutra of neither increase nor decrease' — Wayfarer

So you seem to be mischaracterising the Heat Death?

...a Tathāgata’s dharma body is tranquil because it is a dharma free from duality and a dharma free from differentiation. Śāriputra, a Tathāgata’s dharma body never changes because it is a dharma of no destruction and a dharma of no action.

The Heat Death, as a final eternal state of being, would lack differentiation or duality. There would still be a state of being - a generalised state of "nothingness" that is the equilibration of all particular somethingnesses. But it would have become changeless and featureless. No destruction and no action.

Although to be more accurate, there would be a dim quantum fizzle of black-body radiation - virtual photons with wavelengths the size of the visible universe - being emitted by the cosmic event horizons. Which is about as ethereal a state of being as you could possibly expect from materialistic science. :)

It approaches reality as a problem to be modelled, not as a first-person understanding of life and living. — Wayfarer

OK. You make a sharp distinction between philosophy as a means to know about reality and philosophy as a means to know about the self.

But that hinges on the presumption that we aren't natural phenomena. Your division relies on there being that actual division. And I ask where is the convincing evidence? Once we start to ask the questions in a reasonable fashion, life and mind start to seem much less like supernatural phenomena.

So I take the view that the most reasonable hypothesis is that we are part of nature. Metaphysics can be unified under natural philosophy - which is holism and systems science in modern times.

I am happy for you to make an argument for a supernatural angle on life and mind. But why should I take seriously any theory that is "not even wrong" in being an explanation without observable consequences? What is reasonable about such an epistemology?

But, I maintain, philosophy has a religious aspect. — Wayfarer

I don't exclude religion or anything from either science or philosophy. A scientific approach is the one that doesn't rule out conjecture from the start. It only claims to constrain our belief by the end.

I think a better model is the one that Karen Armstrong created, along the lines of the difference between mythos and logos. The former is the allegorical, the mythological, the symbolic, whereas the latter is the quantifiable, what can be precisely mathematically modeled. — Wayfarer

Which is the one with the relation to the truth of reality, and which one is the construction of cultural identity?

And isn't the semiotic view that the two are related in a pragmatic fashion? We don't actually get to see reality as it is, only how it is useful for us to socially and psychologically construct it. But on the other hand, if there were no reality, then our mythologies would be really pointless.

A nice post. My argument would be that consciousness boils down to there being "a point of view". We model the world in terms some "I" that stands at the centre of this view of things.

And that is what your mirror story helps to bring out. The scientific puzzle is how the whole world could fit inside our heads. Somehow the brain is representing reality as a sensory image or display - a faithful replication duplicating the world as a model or internal simulation. And that sets up the need for a homunculus to witness the model - to take a further point of view on the mental goings-on.

But really, there just is this thing of a brain taking a point of view of the world. And so that is like how we can look into a mirror and see a mysteriously real world beyond the glass. We can bob our head about and even start to peer around the corners to see more of this world.

And what is striking is that the view shows us to be at the centre of this world looking back out. Our point of view is a view with us in it. What we feel psychologically - the feeling of being a self embodied in the world, always taking just one point of view when the world offers any number of possible points of view - becomes a visible fact. We see ourselves now looking back out of a world which contains us in it.

I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings — Janus

The sense of the sublime, the transcendent, the sacred, feelings of reverence, oceanic oneness, divine beauty and so on are all romantic responses. The sense of the ordinary, the mundane, feelings of indifference or neglect, separation, ugliness are its nihilistic counterparts. — Janus

Again, I’m not saying that there is no biology to our feelings. Without neurobiology, there would be nothing to work with at all.

But neurobiologically, feelings are not basic in a sense that they are more fundamental than cognition or perception. The brain works holistically so an emotional response is an act of orientation, a preparation for action, some suitable form of arousal. The valuing is part of processing whatever is happening in the moment in a whole body and ecologically appropriate way.

So what I stress is your social construction of our emotions as an arbiter of cognition. It is not a completely wrong construction. It does feel like something - an aha! - when we make either a significant match or mismatch in cognition. There is a physiological orientation response that is what it is like to feel with sudden conviction that we have definitely got something right, or equally, that we have definitely just been caught out by something that was a surprise.

Yet still, the Romantic model - where our feelings know better and truer than our cognition - is a social construction. It dates back to at least Plato's charioteer analogy - the Greeks having separated off rationality or logos in the first place. Science would construct its own more convincing and evidence-backed view of what is really going on.

So I am responding to your first comment - "I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings."

We know that the brain is pretty reliable when it comes to assessing the threats and opportunities of our environment. Millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning will do that. But once humans became linguistic and cultural creatures, that biological apparatus got turned towards an assessment of a social world of ideas and attitudes and imaginings. And we know how we can talk ourselves into different view on any issue that will evoke quite opposite evaluations or subjective feelings.

With Trump, you could talk him up as some crazed demon that evokes disgust and aversion and fear. Or you could talk him up as a brave patriot willing to take on the dangerous elite and - just by listening to the way the situation is being socially constructed - start to feel the very opposite as your "trusted, deeply felt, gut reaction".

The same with Duchamp's urinal. Is it the wittiest, cleverest, work of art ever? Or is it a tawdry and mean-spirited joke with zero actual aesthetic merit? You should be able to take either set of words and begin to feel the warm approach or the cold withdrawal that is the dichotomous orientation response which your brain is set up for. It is the cognition that is the basis of the feeling here. The idea that we can bypass the cognition and drill down to discover our true and authentic emotional response to the urinal is a Romantic myth.

So in dealing with the world at an animal level, sure we trust our instinctive feelings. Evolution gives us good reason to take extra fright at anything wriggly and snake-like, or something small, leggy, scampery and spider-like. Just as it gives us good reason to think sugary foods are to be gorged upon anytime we are fortunate enough to encounter them.

But to judge philosophical positions on the basis of "subjective conviction" is obvious bad epistemology. Even if, in the end, feeling something is believable or unbelievable does wind up being a state of neurobiological assessment that includes a state of felt orientation, as that is simply how it works. We need to be left prepared with some clearly dichotomous resolution in terms of our action. We need to make up our minds whether we are approaching or avoiding the idea that is at the current centre of attention.

So I am not denying the reality of subjective emotional assessments. I am saying they are no more fundamentally reliable than the frameworks of cognition which they subserve. It's a package deal. You can feel great conviction - then discover you were completely wrong about the way you were construing the situation.

And then, the idea that subjective conviction is some kind of philosophical bedrock is itself a social construction. It is a way of understanding "feelings" that presumes the human mind can connect with a higher transcendent sphere of meaning. And science finds little evidence in favour of that ontology.

Sure, our neurobiology can be manipulated by mindset to evoke a generalised blissful oceanic feeling flooded with a sense of everything understood or connected with, the self depersonalised and immersed in a reality beyond it. Hell, there are drugs that can do that when you might be feeling shit about life.

But to then claim that evoked mental state is genuine or functional is a social construct. The reality is that we are just playing games with our neurobiological possibilities. And if we truly lose control over such games, that is when you get the messianic personality, the psychotic state, the depersonalised person. We kind of know when the social construction - as happens in an "appropriate way" in a church or art gallery - has become a neurobiological pathology.

As we have discussed many times, physics currently has very large gaps in its accounts of the nature of the Universe. — Wayfarer

But perhaps the bigger gaps lie in just how much science now knows compared to how much the general population understands?

So you keep saying the glass is 99% empty - and you might be judging that from only having seen the top 1% of a glass that is pretty damn full to the brim now.

If we know the history of the Cosmos in incredible detail back to around the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, is there still "a very large gap"?

It is being held together and simultaneously driven apart by some unknown force. — Wayfarer

What are you on about. Dark matter and dark energy are known to be two different things.

And that is a typical attitude in today’s scientific culture. It’s thrown the baby out with the bath water as far as I’m concerned. — Wayfarer

Alternatively, it is the approach that has done the most to dispel the air of mystery that has hung over existence.

I agree that Scientism deserves criticism. But in your constant attacks on that, you risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater yourself. You are rejecting the holistic metaphysics of a systems science approach to reality.

I am not convinced that subjectrive feeling has been shown to be exhaustively socially constructed. — Janus

Good job I'm not arguing for exhaustion then. But any feeling given any kind of name is being socially constructed - even if that name is naming its supposed fundamental unnameability or ineffability. As when we call the Sublime.

And even failing symbolic reference, social construction can make use of indexical or iconic semiosis. It can hang a picture on a wall in a fashion that is meant to be approached via a search after signification.

If R.Mutt signs a urinal and puts it on show in a gallery as the "Fountain", it is pretty obvious that we are suppose to "feel something" - even if it might be so novel to us that we struggle to give it an exact name.

But even when it comes to romanticism; I don't accept that it is socially constructed as opposed to mediated. — Janus

How are the two different? When I say socially constructed, that doesn't mean there is no biological construction going on at a deeper level. Semiosis is the recognition of multiple levels of signification or mediation. It is a holistic approach like that.

So I think you are just trying to turn my position into a straw man when you know it is more complex than that.

Same goes for theism; in its various forms it has been pretty much universally present across cultures; so the argument that it is culturally constructed cannot hold water. — Janus

So if something is found across all cultures, it can't be constructed? How does that work?

If it is across all cultures - and not elsewhere - then surely that shows it is culturally fundamental, not that it is not cultural.

I found it all by myself in my early teens and was immediately transported to a brave new world of feeling. — Janus

Hmm. Immediately hey? Just went from whoah to go in a simple transcendent leap of consciousness with no process of enculturation.

Sounds like some convenient myth-making there.

So, the contradiction you thought you found in what I said was merely apparent. — Janus

You are still relying on the hypothesis that feeling is unanalysable and beyond reasoned communal inquiry. And that isn't a strong position given that we know that so much of our "feelings" to be socially constructed sign relations with pragmatic function.

You just said think about Art. And so you meant, think about Art as it is socially constructed in the modern Romantic condition. Get ready to feel awe, intrigue, momentousness, depth ... the sublime.

Now I agree that in the limit, our private experiences are unanalysable. My position has to be able to handle "the Hard Problem" of ineffable qualia. So in the end, there is some subjective limit to any community effort to objectify and analyse phenomenology.

And my answer there is that objectification runs out of steam where it runs into a lack of observable counterfactuals. So I can motivate a neurological account of hue discrimination up to the point where yellow is explained as a lack of blue, and red by a lack of green, but then if we try to ask why should red have the particular quality of being red, then there is no counterfactual to continue on.

The Hard Problem arises where we can't stand in some objective relation even to our own subjectivity. We can't even imagine a difference in terms of what we might feel or experience. And if we can't do that in terms of ourselves, then a wider communal view - the one that is optimised epistemically as the scientific method - can hardly do it either.

So I have an epistemology that accepts a limit to objectivity, but also identifies that limit clearly in the notion of the counterfactual observable - the possibility of something being other than what it is. And on those grounds, I reject your claim that our "feelings" are unanalysable in some generic fashion. They are in fact pretty damn easy to analyse using psychological science.

You say "what about Art?", as if that should be a conversation-ender. Well no. Art history tells us all about the social construction of Romanticism and its notion of the Sublime.

I never took my kids to church, but I certainly dragged them around enough art galleries to do my part in teaching them to master the appropriate cultural responses, just as my parents did with me. :)

C'mon. You're smart enough to understand the game. Romanticism is the new Theism. It demands that we look inside and find our ineffable essence, that spark of pure aesthetic response which is our soul. The social construction of that state of belief is an open book to any historian of the modern world. It's been analysed to death.

You're arguing from objectrive, or at least intersubjective, empirical investigation whereas Wayfarer is really arguing (despite what he might like to think) from subjective feeling. — Janus

Well exactly. That is what I'm pointing out. I am basing my view on what we can definitely know by way of reasoned inquiry. Wayfarer would be doing something else.

But remember also - in being Peircean - my view does start with phenomenology. It does take subjectivity seriously. So it expects the Cosmos to be "mindlike" in some absolutely general fashion. If human consciousness is a natural phenomenon, then it's presence ought to be discernible even in the organisation of the cosmos itself. This is the speculative metaphysics of pan-semiosis.

So stressing the role of thermodynamics (or rather, infodynamics) is simply accepting that mind and cosmos are actually going have the same fundamental organisational principles.

Wayfarer has to demonise pan-semiosis or infodynamics to keep his own vague theistic paradigm going. He must manage to paint it as being the "other" to his mysticism - that other being Scientism. And so anytime I mention entropy, he pretends that that does not contain also the complementary notion of negentropy. Chaos and order go together. And the long run goal is a heat death equilbrium.

Utter peace, if you like. What comes after a frothy bit of excitement. :)

When it comes to conviction regarding metaphysical or religious matters, I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings, in fact when it comes down to it I believe we all inevitably are and should be, but I would never expect another to be convinced by my feeling, or argue that my subjective convictions carry any intersubjective weight. — Janus

Well that is nonsense of course. And by your argument, I don't even now have to give either reasons or evidence for why I should feel that with such subjective conviction.

And given that you say what is private feeling is private feeling - it would carry no weight in terms of one mind speaking to another - I would expect you to withdraw into solipsistic silence on all epistemological matters. You have disqualified yourself from further debate by your own words.

Yet funnily enough, you won't. So I can only point out the inconsistencies I find in the position you claim to hold.

I agree with Lonergan that the basis of objectivity really cannot consist in anything but authentic subjectivity; or as he formualtes it in his transcendental method, being "attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible". — Janus

And so now you circle back to an epistemology based on being reasonable, particular and pragmatic. You arrive at the right answer, even having dismissed the epistemic grounds that I would give for that being the optimally "objective" approach.

we are not simply cosmic flukes or accidental tourists that have been thrown up by the random shuffling of stardust; we have a kin relation to the underlying order (logos) of the Cosmos. — Wayfarer

Well, yes. And what is that underlying order then? Are you denying that physics has found thermodynamics to be fundamental? So wouldn't we then understand ourselves as an expression of that cosmic logos? It should be no surprise to find our intelligence entrained to that most general of all projects?

You would have to argue it the other way round to give the answer you want. You would have to be an idealist who says that the cosmos is an expression of our consciousness. We are causing it to strive to be in our image.

But there is rather less evidence for that version of cosmology.

OK. What difference does it make - cosmically?

But I agreed. How they self actualise - as philosopher or physicist - makes no real difference. So long as a developed nation level of entropy production is in place, how the entropy is spent is a free choice because it is a matter of indifference to Mother Nature. All they have to do is produce a typical Aussie share of degraded resources.

Precisely. Hence those count as free choices. Essentially meaningless as far as Mother Nature is concerned. What matters to Her is that you are living the bounteous lifestyle of one of the planet’s most civilised nations.

Beats the hell out of being a heat sink — Wayfarer

Hmm. If you checked, what would would be your daily kilojoule production?

https://cncf.com.au/carbon-calculator/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIubWR-dzP2QIV0o6PCh3K7gt0EAAYASABEgJNKvD_BwE

Now, it might be that Aristotle was mistaken in this regard, but that is not really the point at issue. — Wayfarer

This is straying from the topic, but it seems a contradiction that Aristotle starts by defining flourishing in terms of self actualisation and building a life through rational action, then you want to make this the final takeaway - that contemplation is an “ethereal” ultimate stage of development.

It might be highly abstract, but that’s different in my book.

This is the 'spiritual' side of philosophy, and I'd say that non-objective side. — mrcoffee

Speaking personally, I’m only interested in philosophy in the sense of the Western tradition of critical thinking. So it is all about de-subjectivising our belief systems, for me.

On the lower levels though, I imagine some codes just replicating more than others. Would control not be metaphorical here? — mrcoffee

Sure. But still, the key point is that life gains organismic autonomy in being able to use information to regulate physics. So the basis of freewill - that is intelligent, selfish and goal directed behaviour - is there right from the ground up. As soon as a molecule becomes a message, we are talking about life being freed from the kind of strict Newtonian determinism that causes all the metaphysical angst about human freewill.

In order to pursue the question, it has to be meaningful, but if you’re sure at the outset that it can’t be, then indeed it will not be. — Wayfarer

Huh? My pragmatic approach is open to revision. All it says is that to be meaningful, it has to make a difference. So if you want to talk about what lies "beyond" our current understanding of nature, you have to speak about something that might make an actual causal difference.

I don't have to make up my mind in advance. Or rather, epistemically my mind is organised to have this open-ended approach to inquiry. So if you can tie some theory to to some evidence, go for it. It is your claim after all.

I do have an objection to the way that biosemiotics claims to incorporate the Aristotelian sense of ‘final purpose’ however. And that is because from the biological perspective, the only purpose can be to survive and pro-create. — Wayfarer

Biology is larger than you allow. Is there no sense in which an eco-system flourishes? Does biology not get the value of a rich community with a nested hierarchical structure and resilience or ascendency?

So you are simply arguing based on a Darwinian caricature of nature red in tooth and claw. It's like you believe the Scientism you are so fond of attacking.

Whereas for Aristotle himself, the final goal of the philosophical quest was something much more ethereal - the philosopher contemplating the eternal Ideas (or something along those lines). — Wayfarer

Hmm. You may be projecting here. Plato or even Pythagoras would make a better target of this particular fantasy. :grin:

I mean, Aristotle is counted as a ‘pagan philosopher’, but it was a different age, and had a very different mentality. — Wayfarer

Yep. Our ideas advance. We ought to bear that fact in mind.