Remember that I was talking about a contextless fluctuation. So it is the fluctuation that is an action in a direction. And these would count as the accidents predicated of the potential.

[EDIT] Also note that following the logic of vagueness - "that to which the PNC fails to apply" - the accidental vs the necessary becomes a moot distinction when talking about the potential itself. As complementary generalities, they themselves are only actual once stably realised in a world as contrasting limits on the nature of being.

So properly speaking, this firstness of a bare fluctuation is neither really an accident nor an essence during its first moment of happening. But retrospectively, as a stable world develops as a result, it can be seen to be more of an accident than anything else - given the apparent lack of a context to have been "its cause".

This is the difference again between reasoning about the general with the logic of particulars vs reasoning with a metaphysical logic that is rooted in a fully triadic view - one that dialectically derives the particular and the general from the vague.

I would also question pure form at the end. — Andrew M

Thanks for clariflying. And here I would clarify that I only mean that the form would be expressed in its most definite fashion at the end. It would become clear to see in the substantial end state of development.

So you keep repeating. But didn’t Aristotle leave some room for the accidental? - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(philosophy)

Just consider action and direction to be accidental properties of potentiality. They might get actualised as a bare contextless fluctuation, but it ain’t a necessity. However having happened accidentality and set off some reactions, then the regularity of a habit might well develop. Necessity might make its belated entrance on the scene.

Aristotle does in fact use the expressions “prime matter” (prôtê hulê) and “primary underlying thing” (prôton hupokeimenon) several times — Mitchell

Thanks. So you are thinking "hupokeimenon" here makes a further distinction in regard to substantial being? Or is hyle not meant to distinguish matter - as the ultimately unformed - from hupokeimenon in fact?

Prime matter is normally mentioned in contrast to a prime mover, isn't it? So in that context, it would be more generic than "prime substance" as it is matter and form that give you a substance.

However a prime substance could be read as a claim that the hylomorphic condition is what is most primal. The underlying substratum is that which already underwrites both material cause and formal cause in a most primitive sense.

I could get behind either reading to an extent. Though as I argue, neither completely works. You need Peirce's triadic metaphysics which starts with a primal potential - something that is neither yet material, nor formal, yet already the possibility for that hylomorphic combo to arise.

En-mattering requires in-forming. And in-forming requires en-mattering. And all that exists at the start is this mutuality, this dependent co-arising, as a potential.

The other obvious key difference is the Peircean view is based on form as constraint. So Aristotle still frames the issue as having to drill down to a substance than can underlie all construction. That was my point about him being focused on an actuality that can have potentials predicated of it.

It is presumed that for something to persist through all change, some quantity of that thing must be conserved through the whole history of the Cosmos. You don't get something for nothing. The Cosmos has a substance conservation principle.

But like Anaximander, Peirce is taken an open systems view. The Cosmos is formed by "pinching off" some quantity of substance in become semiotically closed by its particular sign system. Like an organism, or a dissipative structure, it sits in an infinite bath of potential, and then forms a structure that can feed off an inexhaustible supply that flows through it.

So again - as I remarked about material instability being regulated by stable information - the paradigm has to be flipped on its head. The substrate that persists through the material changes is in fact primarily the formal one of the emergent constraints.

Matter doesn't play the role of the stable unchanging stuff which gets reworked into multiple forms. Instead, it is the raw and unlimited action that gets constrained by some kind of global organisation of closure. Substance gets its "materiality" by prime matter or raw potential become trapped into certain restricted "habits". Finitude is what finality - final and formal cause - imposes on infinitely unbounded fluctuation.

Yet, you say my reading is tendentious! But, keep coming! You're more than halfway to NOT being physicalist already, you're only an epiphany or two away ;-) — Wayfarer

Never going to happen. Not unless I get a brain tumour or something. 8-)

Aristotle scholars call it "Prime Matter", not "Prime Substance". — Mitchell

Yep. That was my point. I was puzzled Andrew was calling it prime substance. But then I guess that the problem is Aristotle was ambivalent about the status of prime matter in exactly the way I tried to describe.

In places you can read him as trying to talk about pure potential. The material aspect of reality would be no more than "the accident of a fluctuation" - the possibility of an action in a direction, without yet a definite context - if we dial existence back to its first bare beginning.

But then - I agree - that even a fluctuation is already "formed" in some matchingly minimal sense. So you can’t escape this Firstness as being substantial as well.

It sounds paradoxical. My own reply is that at least Firstness or vagueness is our conception of whatever it is that could count as being the least substantial state of being. It is a suitably apophatic description. We can get some kind of useful handle on the Big Bang "pure materiality" this way.

Then also it feels right to assert that matter comes before form when taking this approach. If prime matter is a substantial state, it is the least substantial form of material/effective causality in lacking yet a world with a history that might provide any proper regulation. The full form of that world is not going to be completely revealed or expressed until "the end of time".

So finality, or the prime mover, is placed where it should be, at the other end of existence's journey. The Cosmos has to grow into its Being, even if - through mathematics - we can understand that Being to have retrospective necessity. If the beginning was a symmetry, then only certain ways of breaking that symmetry were ever possible. And so the form of the Cosmos can be regarded as latent in prime matter. It could be considered "prime substance" on that ground.

It's all very tricky. And the "prime problem" is that Aristotle was focused on how actuality creates potentiality, rather than the more truly foundational issue of how potentiality creates actuality. Or perhaps even just that the scholastics were interested always in arriving at that interpretation as they wanted to bend Greek philosophy towards the central purposes of their theistic metaphysics.

The need to assume such a principle, that plasma employs semiosis, which is contrary to the evidence, points to bad metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can't see how that can be the case without there being mind in the first place. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind', this does seem to be his meaning. As we've discussed, he seems to have acquired this idea from Emerson, Schelling, Kant, and others of that ilk. He is also invariably categorised as an idealist philosopher - actually as an objective idealist. — Wayfarer

So, the reader or interpreter of symbols, and thus of form and matter, is herself exhaustively constituted by matter/symbol ('symbol' here understood in the broadest sense as inclusive of sign, icon and symbol). Matter/ symbol reads itself? — Janus

The pansemiotic claim is tricky. I readily admit that it is a speculative project. So I will try to explain it better.

Straightforward semiosis is no problem. Humans use language to regulate social behaviour. It is just taken as obvious that language is a symbolic activity where tokens or symbols are used so that a realm of ideas can interact with a world of material dynamics.

Then Peirce sought to define what was the "core machinery" by which language could gain this meaningful "modelling relation" with the world. He drilled down to describe it in epistemic terms - understanding semiosis as the logical act of reasoning. So words have their purchase over reality because of a triadic sign relation. There is the world. There are the signs we form that "represent" it. There is then our habits of interpretation - the understanding we form by virtue of a sign-mediated relation with the world.

This is pretty much straight linguistics. It is a more sophisticated take than Saussurean semiotics in being triadic rather than dyadic. Peirce makes the Kantian point that the sign stands between us and the world. And so the sign represents not just the world, but also "us". The signs we form are inherently "self-interested" in that they represent the world in terms that are pragmatic or purpose-imbued, not nakedly of "the thing in itself". So the mediating level of sign - the "umwelt" that forms our "state of sensation" - is a representation of our state of being, our wishes, desires, interests, and history, as much as it purports to be a representation of the world beyond.

Another important wrinkle of the Peircean approach is that he saw sign as itself having an immanent developmental story. It begins as merely a potential relation - an icon. Develops to become an indexical sign. Then only ultimately reaches full-fledged status as a symbol. So first it is just a picture that can be recognised as involuntarily predicting some state of affairs. Then it becomes a more deliberate pointer - like a dog's wagging tail or a road sign. Only finally is there a full "epistemic cut" where the relation between a token and what it stands for becomes arbitrary and therefore a wholly voluntary, or "self-produced", communicative act that requires interpretance.

The word "apple" - either as a spoken sound or scribbled writing - and an apple have no necessary connection. Therefore the habit of understanding the physical mark to mean something becomes entirely "mental". Mentality begins definitely at that point.

So semiosis is straightforward and uncontroversial. Peircean semiosis is pragmatic as it is clearly tied to an epistemology of the self. The sign relation makes us as much as it makes the world that exists for us. It is an understanding of language use and human reason that gets Kant and manages to accept the key part of idealism without rejecting what matters about realism.

Then armed with an understanding of the triadic semiotic relation, we can see that it applies to life as well as to mind. We can see that brains use neurons to encode the world, form a modelling relation with the world based on sign. And the immune system is semiotic. So is the gut. They use a system of molecular receptors to decide what is self and what is non-self. Then the genes of a cell are clearly a coding machinery, embodying a model of the self in a world in their ability to interpret the signs they are getting in terms of the states of being they are trying to achieve.

So science has no problem seeing Peircean semiosis as a completely general account of life and mind. It describes a triadic "world-making" relation that run all the way from the first biological act - the first time a molecule functioned as a message - right up through complex bodies, to bodies with brains, to brains with language, to languages that were logical, mathematical, and capable of "total reasoned abstraction".

Then we can start to talk about pan-semiosis. This would be a continuation of the story beyond the kind of complexity we recognise in living and mindful systems.

Now Peirce did attempt this with his Cosmological semiotics. He described the triadic relation in a way where the Universe's coming into being as a realm of definite law could be understood as the psychological development of habits of regulation.

As Wayfarer notes, late in life, Peirce did become overtly religious - or at least "spiritual". But how seriously should we take that, given that his semiosis arose out of a scientific psychological model, and then out of a logical generalisation of that psychology?

Wayfarer keeps returning to the one quote that is his convenient hostage to fortune. But it is unfair on Peirce to read his incredibly broad-minded approach to a "philosophy of nature" in such a narrow and self-serving fashion. His semiotics provides an intelligible bridge between the divided camps of physicalism and idealism. To claim Peirce is then just an idealist is cheap and slipshod.

Anyway, Peirce's cosmological semiotic is more a "logical poetry" than a physics-based theory. It was inspired by the dawning thermodynamic understanding of his time. It did foreshadow quantum physics in its emphasis on indeterminism and the observer-depend nature of reality. Peirce even foreshadowed general relativity in proposing that an evolving universe might show curvature over cosmic measurement scales - his early career as a scientist meant this kind of measurement issue was exactly his forte.

So the context of Peirce's cosmological argument was that he was fully up to date with the science of his age. And he could see that the Newtonian notion of an eternal Comos with fixed God-given laws was pretty "unnatural" in a world where mind, reasoning, growth and evolutionary development were a central fact.

Thus Peirce created his theory of an immanent pansemiotic cosmology where hierarchically complex existence was formed via a "universal growth of reasonableness".

The story went that in the beginning was a Firstness, a bare potential of spontaneous fluctuation or tychism. The sporting of absolute chance. So there was a vagueness with no particular matter or form. But then that meant there was nothing to prevent accidental fluctuations that were some kind of context-less event - a bare action with a direction of some kind.

Then if something could spontaneously happen once, it might happen again. With nothing preventing it, you would have a host of fluctuations and so now the Secondness of some more definite act of interaction. One fluctuation would react with another. The possibility of a history of collisions, deviations, agglomerations, deformations, etc, could start to form.

Then once you have this random play of interactions, regularities would start to emerge. Over time, a history would start to exist in a way that became generally constraining. A habit or state of equilibrium would result.

This was straight thermodynamcs. Inject a hot particle into a tepid gas standing at equilibrium and the particle will eventually knock about in a way so that its momentum converges towards the general average. A cold particle will get bumped and jiggled to heat it up to the average. So the laws of nature can be understood as nothing more than the kind of rational patterns that emerge as the "sum over histories" of a set of interaction - a prevailing statistics.

The Universe would have been born of unbounded fluctuations - the primal chaos of a Firstness. But it then could not help but to self-organise in the fashion described by both thermodynamics and quantum physics. The first random actions might have any direction, any strength. But then their interactions would thermalise them, tame them, bring them towards some common equilibrium that gave the Universe an overall direction or developmental flow. A collective history become a collective constraint. Existence becomes a single universal habit.

So Peirce's semiotic - the triadic system of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness - is the ontological version of his epistemic triad of world, sign and interpretance. Semiotics in the linguistic or psychological sense is about the symbol~matter distinction - the epistemic cut by which a realm of ideas can come to regulate a world of material dynamics. Now Peirce was using the same causal machinery to explain the physical world as if it had "a mind".

The metaphysical question becomes how much is this just a nice analogy and how much a proper theory of nature and existence? So pan-semiosis would be showing how it is actually a theory more than an analogy.

Well if we look at the way physics went after Peirce's time, we can see how the observer issue moved back to centre stage.

Newtonian physics was reductionist in being a realist physics based on just observables. Basically, humans believed they were looking at reality with a God's-eye view of it. There was no issue about where to place the epistemic cut between the observer and the world observed. Naive realism applied. Then came Kant to show the psychological problems inherent in that. And then Peirce - whose career as a scientist was all about science's fundamental issue of how to make an "objective measurement".

But the observer issue became central to modern physics in the 20th century. Quantum mechanics showed something really "weird" was going on as humans just couldn't seem to disentangle themselves from the world they wanted to measure. But relativity was just as weird. Again, an observer was only relatively disentangled from what they meant to observe. And even eventually thermodynamics returned the same metaphysical shock. Chaos revealed the initial conditions measurement issue for describing dynamics. The Newtonian approach to entropy turned out to be also the inverse of a measurement of observer uncertainty - the metaphysical twist that turned physics towards its new information theoretic perspective.

So nature really seems to be trying to tell us something. To understand it, we need a semiotic lens. A fundamental theory of nature will have to include the observer along with the observables in some formal fashion. We can't pretend to have a simple God's-eye view like Newton. The "mind" itself must be reduced in some completely general fashion. And Peirce offers the most general story on how observers and observables - selves and worlds - are developed through the mediation of the third thing of the signs that connect them.

So the metaphysical project is clear. Physics is already charging down that road. But there are still some paradigmatic shifts in thinking that are a long way off for virtually everyone. We can't "get" pansemiosis until we have made some quite significant changes in orientation.

The key one that currently interests me is the importance of material instability to the whole picture.

The usual assumption is that the material part of the story must be about stability, definiteness, concreteness, persistence. It just make sense that the material foundations of being must be sturdy for the more delicate business of symbolically-encoded complexity to arise. You definite parts to start constructing elaborate wholes ruled over by rather immaterial ideas or purposes.

But the recent biophysical revelations about the molecular basis of life show that a cell depends on its fundamental instability. All its molecular parts must be in danger of falling apart to make them in fact easily controllable by the cell's information. So life seeks what was, back in the 1980s, called the edge of chaos, or self-organised criticality. It is materiality at its most fragile or labile that is "living enough" to become the robust foundation of living processes. As what is poised on the point of falling apart is also poised on the point of falling together. All the molecular chaos needs is a steadying genetic hand - enough of a signal pointing in the "right direction" that is the falling together.

So biosemiosis is about this central understanding. Life depends on fragile material. It wants a material foundation so labile that it can then become "completely regulated" by the ideas and purposes remembered at the informational level of the genes. The job of stabilising is owned by the system's information. The mind of the cell - as a collection of learnt habits - is the source of its long-run stability.

So consciousness is often thought of as being centrally about spontaneous creativity and maximum fluidity. But neuroscience has also come to realise it is the same story of a regulation of uncertainty. The mind is centrally about habit formation. And it exists to stabilise a collection of useful physical or behavioural interactions with the world.

Any other model of "the mind" - like a spiritual or freewill one - is fundamentally flawed. Even the linguistic human mind is all about creating a social and cultural stability. Humans - as animals - are a bunch of unstable degrees of freedom. But language is society's way to bind humans into collective organisms. As we see in modern society, personal instability is promoted - we are brought up to imagine that anything might be possible in terms of how we might behave. And then that individuated instability becomes a potent energy that society can harness - keep nudging just enough so that we collectively fall together in some enduring direction while always seeming to be on the verge of catastrophically falling apart.

OK, this story of semiosis as "the stable realm of symbol regulating the instability of material reality" works for life and mind. Then pansemiosis would extend that to the physical world in general.

And again, this is simply just the view that physics has been backing into for about 100 years now. Quantum mechanics tells us the Cosmos is fundamentally indeterministic and then needs "a context" to collapse its uncertainty. What creates material stability is thermal decoherence. And this context, this history, is then "written into" thermal event horizons. The holographic principle shows that the physics of "material events" is ruled by the "information content" that can be encoded on the "surface" of a physical region of spacetime.

So it sounds odd if - as MU does - we try to understand pansemiosis in terms of the Cosmos literally having some kind of mind that is interpreting physical events as symbolic activities. This starts to sound like the pan-psychism of Whitehead and his prehending particles. Atoms are reading each other as signs rather than just colliding like material billiard balls. Spooky, hey?

But still, modern physics actually has rejected the material billiard balls now. Two particles crash into each other and recoil in some far less material way. In quantum language, the collision starts to become a blizzard-like exchange of virtual particles - tiny messages that you are getting too close to me and need to start backing off. The pressure of exchanges increases until the other particle is forced to veer off.

And then as we really step back to a quantum field description, the reason why two particles bounce off each other becomes just some kind of statistical effect - an completely informational one. The probabilities of where the two particles ought to be becomes exponentially "anywhere except as close as this". Even the last material connection of virtual particles has vanished. The quantum picture has switched to one of pure sign. All the physics can properly describe is the abstract image of a completely generic wavefunction. Somehow an observer must then intrude "physically" to tell us what actually happened on this or that particular occasion with the same kind of probabilistic set-up.

So I accept that pan-semiosis sounds weird. But reality is weird! And pan-semiosis is a metaphysics weird enough to account for all of the phenomena that science is most concerned about. It is a metaphysical machinery that can span the gamut from the quantum to the cosmic, the physical to the mental. Even if physics ends up calling it something else, it will still be pansemiotics as Peirce originally envisioned it. And it is quite nice that in theoretical biology at least, a conscious connection to Peirce has been forged in the public embracing of "biosemiosis" over the past 20 years.

So with prime substance we have true metaphysical immanence. — Andrew M

So where exactly did Aristotle spell out an argument for prime substance? Do you have a reference in mind?

Did you mean something like an Apeiron? I agree that nothing comes from nothing, but also it can't be the case that immanent being is an efficient/material tale of how something comes from something. That way lies only infinite regress.

So the Peircean take is that something definite arises semiotically from a "something" that is its radical "other". A Firstness, a logical vagueness, a bare potential. If the crisply existent reality we now see all around us is composed of a variety of hylomorphic substances, then logic can say that how that state of affairs developed was by some first act that is hylomorphism at its most decomposed. :)

So the first substantial act or occurence would be the least possible state of being in terms of being en-mattered and in-formed - some kind of spontaneous fluctuation.

This Peircean notion most resembles Aristotle's talk about prime matter. But I don't recall there being a reference to prime substance as such.

Janus is right. Here you are just trying to win an argument by playing with definitions.

Sure you can identify being with mind, consciousness or spirit if you are asserting ontic idealism. But the metaphysical understanding of “being” is the general one here. Idealism is just one of the possible ontic positions.

So, again, the question that occurs to me, is that if there is a top-down organising principle, as systems science seems to be saying, what is responsible for that, because the ‘immanent metaphysics’ model seems very bottom-up, as far as I can understand it (which I readily admit might not be very far.) — Wayfarer

The Peircean position which I take would see this matter - like a plasma - as the simplest form of actualised substance. Then human being stands at the opposite pole in being the most hierarchically complex form of actualised substance that is currently known by us.

So plasma is animated by top-down telos and order, as you would put it. It is hylomporhic substance. It is not bare stuff but stuff shaped by entropic purpose and lawful structure. Both a plasma and a human are fully developed, fully actualised, fully hylomorphic, substances. They just stand at opposite ends of a spectrum that defines the fundamentally simple and the massively complex.

So far, so Aristotelian. The physical difference between a plasma and a human is one of degree, not kind.

The Peircean twist would be then to question what makes life and mind distinctive. A human is not merely just more complex. A human is semiotic - a living organism in a modelling relation with its world. So there is this extra symbol~matter twist - the epistemic cut - that goes now to a difference in kind.

However then - a further now metaphysically speculative slant, as it is not quite yet mainstream science - we could see all nature ruled by semiosis. Even a plasma may have this irreducible structure in some meaningful sense. And so we would be able to track a continuity of kind (to some degree) as we go from living organisms back across the epistemic modelling divide to regard the simple material world again.

The advantage of this pan-semiotic view is that it would properly ground the phenomenon of living being in the world. It would articulate both what is the ontic difference, and also what is the basic dynamical causal mechanism “all the way down”.

Semiosis explains immanence or self-animation through an appeal to the dual reality of both matter and symbol. And it is nice if we can understand the symbol part as being there at the fundamentally simple level too - as we discussed in your thread on physics’ turn towards information theoretic descriptions.

I don't see how the repetitious maintaining of whatever systems, objects, processes, needs to happen. Novelty schmoevelty.. it's all the same- MAINTENANCE. — schopenhauer1

Are you ever going to deal with the reality that this could be your minority opinion. Maybe what you see as repetitious maintenance is something most folk are evolved to enjoy?

I mean, according to you, it would make no sense that I would ever have spent hours a day laboriously hitting a tennis ball back over a net, time after time. And if I couldn't find a hitting partner, I would even just use the wall. Yet no one ever forced me to do this.

Sure, you can also point to an imperfect world where jobs are dull and unrewarding. Life can involve a lot of necessary chores. But that just says something about those particular forms of activity. The fact that "work" and "repetition" can also be highlights of our existence means your basic thesis is flawed. The problem isn't with existence in general, it is with particular situations that we might feasibly improve upon.

I mean why do you keep repeating the same basic lament, laboriously re-typing the same sentiments? Why do you feel so compelled to maintain this system of anti-natal protest?

Is it work that you ... enjoy? :-O

It can't merely count as a distraction from the truth of existence if anti-natalism claims to be that truth.

So to answer your question, there are various realist views even within Scholasticism. But I think they ultimately boil down to either transcendent or immanent realism. — Andrew M

But immanence needs to account for itself by way of some inner mechanism. And Aristotle rather danced around on both sides of the argument.

As Boethius put it, "... Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles." — Andrew M

That is a familiar framing of hylomorphism that lends itself to a fairly nominalist reading. Actuality is substantial being. Potentiality is the properties that can be predicated of substance. Materiality becomes some sort of passive brute existence. This is an ontology of a world of already given objects, not one that is in fact a story of immanent development - a process with a self-structuring flow.

To be fully immanent, a tale of prime matter and prime mover is not enough. This is an ontology targeted at recovering the physics of a world already gone cold and congealed - a classical realm of atoms blundering about a void.

It is presumed that substance is ideally understood as a passive, enduring, solid, bounded, state of "matter with properties". That is certainly the world that is most immediately familiar to us, as humans, with human purposes. Our interest in reality revolves around how we can use the world to build things and regulate things. We are looking for the "secrets of construction". And so the idea of a stack of bricks and a set of architect drawings strikes us as the most natural image of natural causality.

But metaphysics has to step back and understand immanence in terms of actual developmental processes. It has to be more like Anaximander and Heraclitus. So bricks are mud that has ceased to be muddy. They are substantial only because they have approached the limit of a process - the entropy dissipating one of drying out and forming tighter mineral bonds.

A truly immanent metaphysics sees the material parts as much emergent as the "immaterial" whole. And so this requires a triadic framework. The part and the whole, the matter and the form, the physical degrees of freedom and the physically constraining laws, must co-arise out of a primordial vagueness or chaos.

Aristotle rather dismissed Anaximander and Heraclitus on this score. And he was right in a way.

There is a secondary story of actuality yielding potentiality in that once the world is substantially formed - once it is a realm of cold and congealed stuff, a clutter of material objects - then constructive causality really becomes a big thing. You have a foundational simplicity - some range of stable substances with their stable properties - that can then start to generate an emergent complexity. You have your world of atoms that start to combine mechanically and build more complicated designs.

So Aristotle is quite focused on that secondary tale - the one where constructed complexity becomes the further possibility immanent in any stable substance. Once you have a lump of wood, you can start thinking about fashioning a table. But give a carpenter a bucket of water, and the lack of inherent stability in the water means there is not a lot of furniture immanent in it. A water bed at best.

There is nothing wrong with telling this follow-on story where potentiality gets switched to become a predicate of substantial actuality.

But true metaphysical immanence is about how the potential produces the actual. And that requires a bootstrapping or self-structuring view of causality.

This is confusing, because nominalism is 'names only' - i.e. that what realists think are universals, are really just names for similarities. — Wayfarer

And so nominalism depends on an ontology where everything is a material particular. The differentiation of being is the primary fact. The integration we see and give name to is entirely secondary. It is not recognised as something that is equally real.

As I argued, a triadic metaphysics accepts that the integration, or the constraining top-down causes, are "merely" emergent and not primary being. But then so also is any local individuation or differentiation. The particulars are just as emergent, so have the same ontic status. Neither are "real" in that sought-for sense.

And even the primary reality is just a primordial notion of bare potential. It ain't "real" either.

You wouldn't say that laws are expressions of latencies that is actualised by concrete instances? I'm having trouble understanding 'emergent' as that seems to suggest laws or regularities are 'consequent to' - that first of all there's material bodies, then the laws 'emerge'. — Wayfarer

Development proceeds from the vague to the crisp. So from the first moment, both the universal laws and the concrete instances have only the haziest existence. The first act - the Big Bang moment - counts as no more than a fluctuation, a fruitful suggestion, the right start to a proper separation.

And we see this in the quantum physics of the Big Bang. It begins as a hot soup of radiation, an undifferentiated mess of potential being. There are no local definite particles. It's too hot and small. There is no organised physics of constraining forces. Again, it's too hot and small.

The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, even gravity - none of these clearly exist at the first moment. The familiar laws of physics have not yet emerged. It takes cooling and expansion to allow the familiar laws to condense out and start organising the initial maelstrom fluctuation.

So electrons and electromagnetism are both emergent features of our classical reality. The particulate matter, and the laws that rule them, have to pop-out in mutual fashion due to developmental symmetry-breakings or phase transitions.

We can of course look back and read their future existence into the white hot and formless first moment of the Big Bang. The mathematics of symmetry now account for how they were inevitable as the way things would eventually get structurally organised. But properly speaking, both the matter and the form only emerged into actual substantiality when the Universe had developed enough to make another break in its initial state of high symmetry.

Physics already takes an emergent view of law as well as matter. Although it is true that most physicists wouldn't put it that way.

Whereas I had thought that in modern cosmology, something like the dimensionless constants (which might correspond to constraints) are real prior to the particulars, and that when laws to emerge, it's because these latencies are now being actualised - 'what is latent becomes patent'. — Wayfarer

The terminology here is confusing. Physics calls things like the various coupling constants of the forces "dimensionless". But the truly fundamental constants - the "dimensional" ones, the foundational triad of h, G and c - seem more properly the dimensionless as they are only measured against each other. They are bootstrapping in that they don't require measurement against some further external dimensioned backdrop. You can just set their "strength" to 1 and get on with it.

So the dimensional constants - h, G and c - are the properly latent ones as they encode the very fact of a "reality forming dichotomy" in my view. They are what I would rather call "dimensionless" precisely because they only stand in an inverse or reciprocal relation to each other. All the basic aspects of the Universe are a playing off of h vs G (that is: the quantum action vs the gravitational action).

The quantum action stands for a primordial notion of differentiation. The gravitational action stands for a primordial notion of integration. And then c - the speed of light - captures the universal "rate" at which they interact to form a substantial state of being.

So the dimensional constants are certainly latent in the potential that became the Big Bang cosmos. They are our most naked description of the fact that reality exists because any naked potential is a potential for just this kind of differentiation~integration kind of world-making dichotomy. If there is causality, it must take this logical form - material particulars vs global constraints.

Again, h scales the bare act of differentiation. G scales the bare act of integration. Once you have these two polar tendencies in operation - the "accident" of a Big Bang fluctuation - then you get the third thing of a rate, a universal speed, at which they mutually develop into increasingly concrete being.

The big question then is what to say about the dimensionless constants - all the further couplings strengths of the various forces and masses that become "exposed" due to further symmetry breakings as the Universe cools and expands.

It could be that they are mathematically hardwired as well. There may be a fundamental geometric explanation - a mathematical constraint that lurks and gives a constant its necessary value. Or it could be that we have to accept some kind of multiverse scenario where a random range of these dimensionless constants could be expressed. They themselves might be a "degree of freedom" within the bigger cosmos-forming picture.

The jury is out. But I obviously favour the simpler idea that all the constants will turn out to have a sufficient mathematical necessity so that our Universe can be understood as a single unitary "mathematical event".

All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? — Mitchell

There is also what CS Peirce called his extreme scholastic realism, or realicism. That follows from Avicenna and Duns Scotus. And it fits with a modern systems science view of causality.

The way I would put it is that universals are our names for natural limits. They are the emergent regularities - the symmetries or laws - that emerge to bound nature.

So as Avicenna argued, the world in itself is not pre-divided into the general and the particular - some realm of matter vs some realm of form, for example - rather it expresses everywhere that potential to become divided in this fashion. It can become organised or structured in a way that is understood as a separation towards these two complementary poles of being.

So the particular and the general are both limits - the furthest that reality can go in these two kinds of opposed developmental directions. The limits are themselves thus also real. They actually do causally limit reality's development. Their existence is not fictional, just as the fence around a paddock is really there.

But also, these limits or bounds are not real in the embodied, substantial, hylomorphic fashion that most folk mean when they talk of the "physically real". In being limits - the place where reality finishes or completes the fullness of its "coming to be" - they are also exactly where substantial reality ceases to be. The line we draw to mark the circle isn't part of the circle. We can certainly give a name to a limit - an edge where things suddenly stop. We can point in a direction to where it lies. However the reality of the limit lies in this apophatic fact. It marks the edge, the boundary, of what you are calling reality.

To flesh this out further, in systems science or hierarchy theory, we would call the general and the particular, global constraints and degrees of freedom. So universals really refers to the notion that reality is organised by its emergent constraints. Restrictions arise that give form and purpose to substantial being.

Then particulars are degrees of freedom, or the material and efficient causes of substantial being. Constraints give shape to bare material possibility. And then having being shaped, this stuff can start to have constructive action. It becomes a substantial kind of possibility - a play of atomistic being - which combines and reacts in the familiar Newtonian mechanistic fashion.

The explanation gets confusing at this point because an atom is a universal term. Just like any substantial being, we can point to the form and the purpose that gives an atom its shape - its mode of being as a degree of freedom, as a primary material/efficient cause, with the "goal" of blindly and mechanically reacting so as to produce more complex constructions.

However this is consistent with Anaximander, Avicenna and others who say reality itself is just the potential to become organised by a separation towards the opposing limits of particulars and universals, constructive degrees of freedom and limiting constraints.

Atoms are a substantial expression of this ontology on the smallest or simplest scale - as modern quantum particle physics makes plain. But the same hylomorphic principle applies at every level of substantial being, including the most complex, as with life and mind.

So this extreme scholastic realism or systems thinking treats both the particular and the general as limits. Both are emergent from reality - this "reality" being itself the third more primordial thing of a not-yet-divided potential with a readiness to become structured by the division represented by the particular and the general.

Reality thus - as Peirce put it - comes with an irreducible complexity. No one part of it seems actually real. You have a primordial potential that lacks either the particularity or generality of actual substantial being. And then the particular and the general are our names for the complementary limitations on actual substantial being. They are not "real" in the conventional sense either. They are just the two extremes of causal action - the emergence of regularity or law into the developing world, and the matching emergence of concrete or material degrees of freedom into that world.

Actuality or substantial reality is what you finally get out of this triadic or hierarchical process of development. It is the structured result - or at least our snapshot view of whatever degree of definite hylomorphic development has occurred by that point.

Again, it is all a flow, all a process of coming to be. The idea of arriving and becoming completely fixed in a classical physical fashion - a world of definite objects - is itself an illusion, not "real" in the usual way people want to mean it. Like Heraclitus and his river, it looks like an actuality, but actuality remains only relative.

To be actual would be to actually arrive at the limits we encode with the notions of constructing particulars and bounding generals. And achieving that would negate the fact that they are "the limits". If you could arrive at the edge of being, it would no longer be the edge. It is like claiming to have arrived at infinity having done enough counting. Finitude can't touch the infinity that bounds it, though it can strive endlessly to reach it.

To sum up, a long line of "systems" thought argues that the dualism or dichotomy of the universal and the particular can only be resolved triadically.

The usual view of realism seeks to make it a monistic choice - one or the other is the real "real". Atomism was the creed that material particulars are the primordially real. Platonism was the creed that formal generals are the primordially real. Then most folk get stuck with the feeling that both seem kind of real, and so some kind of confused dualism must be tolerated.

The way out of this is to go for the holism of a three-way developmental story. Which - being what we find right back with Anaximander - is also a pretty ancient metaphysical position.

Now we have an emergent systems view where in the beginning is just a bare potential - an Apeiron, a Firstness, an Ungrund, a Vagueness. That's not really real. But it can be logically divided. Dialectically, any potential harbours its complementary opposites. And so within the barest notion of the potential lies the possibility for a dichotomy of the general and the particular. You have two logically matched limits in terms of matter vs form, local constructive action vs globally constraining action.

These are not really "real" either. They are the ultimate limits on being as a possibility. They are the two directions in which a potential can be divided. They exist only as the ultimate extremes of those contrasting directions of development.

However together as a triad, these three can be seen as the fundamental aspects of a holistic reality within which hylomorphic substantial being emerges as an ontically structured state. A world of objects is what we arrive at.

So in the end, nominalism starts to look the correct view, the classical physics view, as we seem to exist in a static Universe ruled by abstract God-given (or mathematics-given) laws and composed of atomistically material particulars. (That is, if we can ignore the reality of bounding laws of physics, we can pretend that material particulars are all we need to consider as "the substantially real".)

Where does pseudoscience fit into all of that? If there isn't a hard distinction between those 3 subjects, can we expect there to be a hard distinction between good and bad science? — MonfortS26

Pseudoscience doesn't fit in. And so it falls out. Not a problem. That is where the feedback loop comes in. The method is designed to amplify the good and damp the bad.

The distinction doesn't have to be hard. In fact it doesn't want to be. It wants to be intelligent and flexible. It wants to be reasonable, in other words.

But philosophy does rely on observation of the world. There is a confirmation step involved in the beliefs it might form. Good philosophical argument involves being able to call forth particular examples that go to the generalities being claimed.

So philosophers, mathematicians, scientists and people in general reason in the same basic way. They make a guess, see that there are consequences of a view, claim support on the basis of what they then can observe.

If you tell me it is raining, I might ask how you know. You will say you stuck your head out and looked. There is no mystery here. I will think that a reasonable reply.

The difference arises in the focus of a discipline, in what it seeks to elevate to formalised practice.

Maths grants itself the freedom to become a pure play of deductive pattern spinning. There is no formal necessity to claim a connection to reality. Although maths is then culturally supported because it in fact does lead to some very big pay-offs in that regard.

Science then gets very serious about models of reality. It wants to formalise the act of measurement as much as possible - ensure it targets a notion of objectivity or mind-independence.

Philosophy plays another kind of useful game. It focuses on abductive conjectures and polishing the machinery of critical thinking. It doesn't have to be about the world. But it is hoped that it might be about the world. Ontologically, it wants to generate abductive possibilities. Then epistemically, it wants to cultivate the right kind of reasoning process. Through philosophy of science, for example, it wants to keep an eye on the habits of science, make sure they are still fit for purpose.

I'm not claiming there is a hard line between any of these reasoning domains. I'm saying they are all useful variations on the one theme.

And I'm not sure what you think could be the alternative. How can thought proceed except first with a fruitful guess, second with the logical working out of the general consequences of that, and third by some sufficient act of confirmation?

For some reason, using reasoning, some people just absolutely insist on some artificial hierarchy. — Rich

Reason creates its own natural hierarchy. Cream floats to the top, cranks rant alone in the basement. What works, simply works. The rest is noise from off-stage.

So do the 3 different forms of reasoning have individual value, or are they dependant on eachother? — MonfortS26

They are three stages of the one process. So it is a natural sequence that leads from questions to answers.

The first one, abduction, is of course basically about intuition and inspiration. It is not easy to formalise as a method. You can't prescribe insight. But you can certainly create a culture and habits of work that support it.

What do you mean when you say philosophy splits off deduction? Didn't Aristotle create deductive reasoning before the scientific method? Is there a way to map out different "degrees of rigor" where science isn't applicable? — MonfortS26

The ancient Greeks were startled by the power of maths. They discovered the unreasonable effectiveness of axiom-based deductive arguments. So they were all about "the right way to reason". They didn't have to make a big deal about the right way to measure or confirm as they had enough to be getting on with just by using the confirmation possible by looking and seeing.

Amusingly, the famous slight against Aristotle by Bertrand Russell is that he typified the philosophical mindset by making wild claims about women having fewer teeth than men. "...although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”

And yet Aristotle was a close observer of nature - for his time. What he actually wrote was: ”Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made.”

So Aristotle was wrong about the facts. More accurate data would have been available. And eventually Western history produced the kind of experimental mindset that forced folk to start checking their claims.

The fork between philosophy and science happened about there. But if we are talking about the big picture of reasoning as a method, Aristotle spelt out the principles of induction too.

Deductions are one of two species of argument recognized by Aristotle. The other species is induction (epagôgê). He has far less to say about this than deduction, doing little more than characterize it as “argument from the particular to the universal”. However, induction (or something very much like it) plays a crucial role in the theory of scientific knowledge in the Posterior Analytics: it is induction, or at any rate a cognitive process that moves from particulars to their generalizations, that is the basis of knowledge of the indemonstrable first principles of sciences.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/

Isn't that just the foundation of the scientific method though? — MonfortS26

Exactly. Science is what reasoning looks like at its most rigorous level of application.

This is the point made by CS Peirce, the guy who invented the philosophy of pragmatism. Reasoning - when considered in its full sense - is this three stage process of abduction, deduction and induction. That is, hypothesis, theory and test.

Now philosophy seems to split off deduction. Somehow the logical derivation of consequences from axioms or premisses feels the core action. It is the most mathematical part of the business of reasoning. Philosophy disconnects from the world to work with pure abstract argumentation. Then science is the rough trade, the uncouth element, that goes out into the world and fusses about with observations and measurements.

It is a nice conceit. But human reason is a method of induction that tries to guess the truth of the world and then seeks to cash that out in terms of predictive knowledge. It seeks intelligibility.

Deductive argument - the exercise of "pure reason" - is an important part of the process. It goes "beyond the evidence" by drawing out the detailed consequences of some set of "plausible" grounding assumptions. It enables us to reach further by framing our ideas in a definite or counterfactual fashion.

But those clear and reasonable ideas are nothing unless they check out against the reality they claim to represent.

The ideas can't just be true in themselves. They can only be logically "valid" in some tautological fashion - the closed circularity you were pointing out. To be true in the way we want to mean it, the ideas must prove themselves in the court of our interactions with the world.

And even then - a longer subject - they can only have pragmatic truth, not absolute Kantian thing-in-itself truth. We can't actually transcend the closed circularity of our reasoning about the world. But the scientific method is what it looks like to structure our thinking in the most rigorous, hierarchically-organised, fashion. The best way to "break out" is to create that sharp separation between the part of our thoughts which is a general theory, and the part which is its answering act of measurement or confirming observation.

Inductive reasoning is answered by the evidence. It leads to predictions. Those predictions either tell you the theory was true or not.

So circularity is solved by hierarchy. The logical circle is "broken" when it becomes a feedback loop connecting the general with the particular, the global with the local.

Deductive reasoning and predicate logic are rather stuck in a closed world if taken in isolation. But reasonable inquiry is founded in the larger practice of open-ended inductive argument. Deduction and predication are only particular tools we use to sharpen the derivation of predictions from theories.

They are tautologically circular. Or symmetric and closed. And that is its own strength.

But then reasoning more generally is about producing the asymmetry, the hierarchy, which is global theory that can be cashed out in terms of particular acts of measurement.

A full account of reasoning is three staged. First comes abduction or "a productive guess". Then comes the deduction needed to shape the guess into the formal hierarchical structure of a theory. Then comes the inductive confirmation - the acts of measurement which feed back to tell us the "truth" of the theory and its grounding assumptions.

It is estimated that in temperate latitudes an increase of 10% is achieved, freeing more land for wildlife. — tom

...just look it up in the climate denier's book of alternative facts.

Yes, I was aware that those were apokrisis's quotes, but I wanted to address my response to you, since this is your thread. — Bitter Crank

Sounds legit.

Would you agree that the major disagreement between our views comes from you leaning more relativist than me? — inquisitive

Probably it's rather that I expect morality to have an adaptive natural function. So I would critique it in terms of some objectively-supported notion of evolutionary optimality.

And thus the moral code that worked for humans as hunter/gathers would have objective differences to the ones that worked for grain-farming cultures, mountain-herding cultures, paddy field-cultures, etc. And then the industrial modern culture is its own story again - one where humankind is in fact re-making the ecology of the planet in its own image.

So what is right or optimal for a hunter/gatherer, with the lightest ecological footprint, may be different for Homo technologicus with a footprint so heavy that it means to actually reshape the planetary ecoystem, turn it into a giant managed private estate.

If we can clearly show that a certain thing creates the most well-being and well-being is the thing we optimize for, then we have established a moral truth. — inquisitive

Yep, that's the gist of what I've argued.

The key is that this is a "four causes" view which accepts a telos or purpose as a legitimate part of our description of the world.

Extreme relativism is usually based on the rejection of objective-strength telos. The world is taken as essentially meaningless, a blank canvas for our desires. But Natural Philosophy would see that position as reductionist and unreasonable.

So yes. This becomes an evidence-backed approach. We can identify some definition of what it is to be optimal, or flourishing, or balanced and healthy and enduring. Then we can work out the moral positions which target that generic goal. It is a scientific approach, a pragmatist ethics.

And it is quite a normal way to think in political theory these days. There are plenty of people promoting national happiness indexes as the right way to measure societies. Big corporations have started to believe in sustainability. The social enterprise model is terribly fashionable.

And it was the basis of the Enlightenment approach. The only difference was that the problems of their day were more social and economic than ecological.

To be honest with you, I think we've reached the point where I've exhausted my current knowledge of the underlying philosophical concepts as well as my own beliefs and thoughts. — inquisitive

Hey, the thing is to be actually interested. These are fascinating times with fascinating dilemmas.

The ecological issue is more about stability. Rapid change is what causes "problems".

I don't believe complete moral relativism is a useful concept. Perhaps this is where our divide lies. I think there has to be a certain amount of moral realism in the world. — inquisitive

Hmm. The obvious reply is that you can't just claim an ad hoc mixture of moral relativism and moral realism. It has to be one or the other. Either morality has objective truth or its a subjective choice.

But then my own position is founded on a Naturalism, which does take a mixed view. It grants nature an objective telos. To describe nature properly, we must recognise in particular its global tendency to entropify. The "good" is defined in terms of physical concepts such as symmetry breaking and the least action principle. So nature does give our moral choices an objective basis in its own fundamental set-up.

We can see this showing in traditional moral codes. Morality normally encodes the habits that make for a healthy society. They are the ways to act that create organismic-level success for a culture. Morality is objectively adaptive behaviour.

And then the same organismic view allows for moral relativism. To the degree we are not constrained by nature - not constrained to act in adaptive fashion - we are free. What we choose to do makes no difference. We can invent silly rules if we like. Should we eat pork or not? Once we can farm pork cleanly, the choice makes no objective difference.

So my view does mix the objective and the subjective. A natural system is a mix of laws or constraints, and accidents or spontaneity. But that is very different from the usual claim of moral realism where some particular moral facts "just are". And why they are is either not explained, or explained via some transcendent mechanism.

Would you not agree that there are things that are objectively bad? I don't like to use extremes, but consider rape or genital mutilation. — inquisitive

Is this a good way to argue? Can you prove the objective case by choosing the most easily shared subjective reaction?

There are cultures where genital mutilation is considered a norm, a good thing, a cleansing act. Rape likewise has been socially licensed in various circumstances - even just in notions of being "a good wife".

Of course, subjectively, I find such cultural attitudes archaic and repellent. But then I'm likely a product of a very similar time and culture as you.

So simply feeling these things to be "automatically bad" is what needs to be questioned. And coming up with rational arguments why they just are "objectively immoral" is always going to be suspiciously easy. Arguing for what we want to believe is second nature for folk.

An honest approach to morality would have to be prepared to think more deeply. The question might be, what difference does rape or genital mutilation really make to Nature? Is it one of those meaningless cultural differences, like scarification or kilt-wearing? Or is it objectively mal-adaptive evolutionary behaviour?

It seems to me that one can reasonably argue that any moral framework which justifies these acts is not a moral framework that should be applied. — inquisitive

That's a philosophically shallow approach. It boils down to the view that others who didn't grow up my way, in my culture, are probably wrong when they seem to disagree with my socially inherited belief system. They are wrong because I am right.

It is the completely subjective view. Not at all an objective one.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems that a sudden change of diet to exclude all animal products can be harmful to ones health because certain nutrients aren't present in a purely plant-based diet. — inquisitive

Veganism can be a healthy diet. But overall, we are evolved to eat like hunter/gatherers. Consuming wheat, or drinking animal milk, are more unnatural than boiling a squirrel so far as our digestive system is concerned.

However if we were actually talking about an objectively nature-honouring human diet, then every modern supermarket is the grossest abuse of that. There are immoral levels of sugar, bad fats, preservatives, colourings, etc, in what gets sold.

So which is the bigger social crime - factory farmed chicken or sponsorship of kid's soccer by "sports drink" manufacturers?

I'd admire any true vegan. So not one who lives on pasta and noodles. But really, given the way the food industry is set up, you would also have to have a crank's level of intensity to overcome all the obstacles put in the way of achieving that "perfect diet".

Maybe purely "ethical" pressure isn't enough though? It seems to me that government regulations are still too lax here. — inquisitive

Customer pull is more effective than government push. New Zealand is unusual though. For a start, most of the farming happens out in open fields still. As BitterCrank says, once you have production hidden away in big barns, its going to be a different story.

But to get back to the high level view, I think it is amazing just how much we have already changed the ecology of earth. When it comes to terrestrial mammalian ecosystems, it is now mostly a planet dominated by domestic animals.

Vaclav Smil has written great stuff on this like Harvesting the Biosphere.

So your OP was about the morality of what humans are doing to the planet. My reply is that we need to be careful about our definition of what is natural, and hence what might be objectively "good" about the way we are indeed transforming the planet.

And then to get anywhere on that question, we need to be aware of the real facts. So factory farming seems just the tiny tip of a much vaster iceberg of human-made nature.

If the domestication of the world's ecosystems is a moral dilemma, then vegans are ultimately just as caught up in that as meat eaters.

I may as well paste the relevant bits of an article I did on Smil a few year ago....

Smil says the human population has grown 20-fold in the last 1000 years and nearly quadruppled in just the past century. The numbers are still swelling by 230,000 every day.

So by his calculations, between 1900 and 2000 – allowing for the fact that humans have got on average somewhat taller and rather fatter – the global anthropomass has grown from 13 to 55 million tonnes of carbon (Mt C) by weight, or from 74Mt to 300Mt if you include the water and the body’s other mineral elements.

That is a lot of flesh to feed obviously. But Smil says bottom-line is what scientists call HANPP, or the human appropriation of net primary production – the amount of the planet’s total harvestable plant growth that this many humans now take as their share.

And Smil says it is about a quarter. That is, 25 per cent of the annual terrestrial phytomass production, the conversion of sunlight to plant material, winds up one way or another supporting the 55Mt of human carbon.

Hey yes, we rule!

The calculation is complicated of course. It includes not just the plant growth directly for food but also our take in fuel, fibre and timber.

And nearly half the HANPP figure represents the global loss of photosynthetic potential due to erosion, desertification, human created forest fires and the building over of good land – all the ways we have taken away from the Earth’s usual productivity.

Smil notes the world’s big cities now cover nearly 5 million square kilometers. In the last 2000 years, he says, with deforesting and other deprecations, humans have cut the total phytomass stocks from 1000 billion tonnes (Gt) of carbon to 550Gt.

But there is good news in the HANPP. At least farming efficiency has been keeping it somewhat under control.

Smil says it is estimated that a third of the Earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by human agriculture, some 12 per cent for crops and 22 per cent for pasture.

However because of the green revolution of the mid-20th Century – the switch to industrialised farming with diesel machinery, petroleum-based fertiliser, irrigation schemes and new crop strains – the figures have not blown out quite like they could have.

Over the past century, the global HANPP has only doubled from the 13 per cent supporting 1.7b people in 1900 to the 25 per cent supporting 7.2b people now.

And looking ahead, even with the global population expected to hit 9b by 2050, the human share of the Earth’s photosynthetic bounty may only hit 30 per cent.

Well, that is unless biofuels are needed as an alternative energy source and the resulting agricultural expansion balloons HANPP out to 44 per cent, as some studies suggest.

...

From a New Zealand perspective, this is where Smil’s book gets especially thought provoking. Because as well as the anthropomass and the phytomass, there is also the story of the zoomass – the drastic shift from wild to domestic animals in terms of the planet’s mammal population.

Smil calculates that the agricultural revolution of the past century has seen a seven-fold increase in plant production. In 1900, humans grew 400Mt of dry matter a year. Now it is 2.7Gt. But because humans like meat on their plate, half this phytomass goes to feed our farm animals.

We know the equation of course. It takes about 10kg of grain to produce 1kg of burger meat. And Smil says the consumption of meat in developed countries has shot up from just a few kilos per person per year to over 100kg.

In 1900, the world had 1.6b large domestic animals including 450m head of cattle and water buffalo. Today, that number is 4.3b, with 1.7b cattle and buffalo, and nearly 1b pigs.

In terms of biomass, the increase is from 35Mt of carbon to 120Mt. So about double the 55Mt of humans treading the planet in fact.

Wild zoomass has naturally gone skidding in the other direction, halving from 10mt to 5Mt during the 20th Century. With large grazing animals, the drop has been especially severe says Smil. Elephants have gone from 3Mt to 0.3Mt, the American bison is right off the radar at 0.04Mt.

Tot it up and the numbers are a little bonkers. The combined weight of humanity is today ten times the weight of everything else running around wild – all the world’s different mammal species from wombats to wildebeest, marmosets to rhinos.

And then our livestock, the tame four legged meals soon to end up on our dinner table, outweigh that true wildlife by 24 to 1 all over again. Talk about transforming a planet within living memory. The world is now mostly constituted of people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs.

As Smil says, the balance has gone from 0.1 per cent 10,000 years ago, to about 10 per cent at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97 per cent today. There may still be tens of thousands of wild mammal species sharing our Earth, but really they don’t add up to much of any consequence.

Again, just think about it. We harvest a quarter of the biosphere now. Ourselves and our four legged meals outweigh other terrestrial mammals by a combined 34 to 1.

And no, I’m still not sure I can quite believe Smil’s numbers either. Sometimes in life you are left just shaking your head.

What sets us apart in a way that would grant us more rights over an animal? Do we not have the same right to the land and resources as them? Do they not have the same right to pursue their own interests as we do? Theirs may stem from a more instinctive place, but I don't see how the capability of rational thought grants us more rights. — inquisitive

What sets us apart is that we can make the choices, they can't. We can have rights because we can accept responsibilities in fair exchange.

Now we can decide to be the guardians of nature rather than the exploiters. There is that choice. But unless you can make some argument about morality being an objective fact of nature, or some divinely-ordained reality, then moral relativism applies. Our discussion of how things go for animals is going to be framed within that particular understanding of rights and responsibilities.

It is incoherent to claim that animals just have objective rights unless you can specify how those rights would arise as part of objective reality. It is easy enough to support the subjective possibility that we might chose to grant or withhold those rights just because we humans have some wish. Moral relativism doesn't have an ontological problem. But moral absolutism certainly does.

Well, I suppose that depends entirely of one's definition of nature's true self and whether this is a successful version of it. One could argue that it is the least successful, for example if you propose that a successful expression would be organisms living in relative balance to one another as they do in many ecosystems. Humans have clearly upset any such balance. — inquisitive

But what if we are evolving towards a new balance?

I've posted a ton on this issue - how modern technological humanity is a natural expression of nature's desire to entropify a vast amount of fossil fuel tucked away under the ground - so I won't go into that here. You can search my posts for "thermodynamic imperative" if you like. :)

Yes, it is only us that can act like that, but does that not put a great deal of responsibility on us that we are simply dismissing? — inquisitive

I agree that we are dismissing our responsibilities. We do have scientific foresight. So we are wrong not to be applying it. Just hoping for the best isn't the most moral course of action at all.

So I'm a big critic of the state of play. I am simply making the argument here that for these discussions to be effective, they have to be really honest about the moral realities. As you seem to agree, veganism could be considered a dangerous distraction in its irreality.

On the other hand, maybe veganism is required to really make people confront necessary change with an open mind. When I see vegans having an effective impact on the big issues, then I would take the view that it is not so irrelevant.

I think you are being too optimistic here. How many people really care about farming humanely? The president of the US is in the process of reducing the number and size of natural parks right now. Clearly there are a great number of people that still don't care. — inquisitive

The pace of change here is pretty fast. I've seen trendlines on veganism which would suggest the whole world converting in a generation or so at the rate it has become middleclass trendy.

Likewise, farming practices are changing at a gallop where I live - New Zealand. Cow sheds are now being built with cow back-scratchers. The cows choose when to come in and get milked by robotic milkers. Stuff that would be unthinkable ten years ago is becoming the norm, such is the pressure to be "ethical" when selling to an increasingly informed middleclass public.

So sure, humanity is going to make choices about how humane to be depending on economic trade-offs. There is no perfect world. But that may still be what is morally right if you are a moral relativist seeking to arrive at a rationally balanced view.

You have to establish your moral framework before you can work out its consequences. Are you guilty of having moral wishes before you have established the framework that could legitimate them?

Do infants? I am not sure I understand why the absence of responsibility precludes one from having significant rights. — inquisitive

Infants grow into adults. And they can't become well-formed moral beings unless they are treated as beings which can learn to grow into their responsibilities within a moral order.

Then more generally we extend rights to those who are dependent on us - the disabled, the simple, etc. Perhaps this is sentimental, perhaps it is rational. That is a matter for debate. An argument can be had both ways. Societies that can afford it, certainly do choose to care on the whole.

The points on carbon footprint through food and the mistreatment of animals combine for a shattering conclusion: we are both abusing these animals and destroying their habitat – which they have exactly the same right to as we do – in the process. — inquisitive

So this is where philosophy would start (as any intelligent person accepts the reality of climate change and ecological footprints). Do animals have "exactly the same" rights here? I don't see a good argument that they do.

Taking into account the points above one could argue then that this inevitable demise of our species may well be the only good thing to come out of this catastrophe (it is just a shame that most others will go down with us). — inquisitive

And you will find many expressing that sentiment via numerous posts on this forum. However, the philosophy will lie in making some more rigorous moral argument.

Maybe we should let nature remove the worst parasite she has ever known? — inquisitive

Or Nature's most successful expression of its true self? So far at least?

The problem you have is that only humanity has any moral choice here. It is only us who can act according to some agreed insight.

Now it could be the case that we are unthinking enough - for perfectly natural reasons - that we can't in fact make a moral choice about the state of the planet we are creating. We are institutionally wedded to a particular evolved lifestyle and are just not that intelligently adaptive.

Or it could be the case we are weighing up a couple of big decisions on which way to go.

Largely we are comfortable with an anthropomorphised planet - one where all wildlife has been domesticated or put in a reserve. We can love our pets. We can farm our meat humanely. We can have a few wildlife parks to preserve a tamed version of the untamed past. And that is what would make the majority of the world's population happy enough. So a new morality could be built around fostering those objectives. And that has already been happening.

Then when it comes to planetary climate change and ecocide, we could either vote for a drastic end to growth and a shrinking of the world population, or gamble on our ingenuity to save us. We could place our bets on nuclear fusion, nanotech, geo-engineering - all the usual technology get-out clauses. And if those dreams come true, would that be immoral?

If we instead vote for voluntary suicide of some sort, then is the sum total of human misery going to be less? The unwinding of the global social system could be spectacularly nasty, as we see in any failed nation state. How moral is it to suggest just letting go of the steering wheel until the car crashes off the road? Only a planned wind-down seems moral. And then we have to make a judgement about that human capacity to entertain and execute any such plan.

So examine your presumptions here.

Can humans be unnatural in the way you argue? Even parasites are a universal aspect of nature.

Do animals have rights if they don't have responsibilities? Morality hinges on the actual possibility of making a reasoned choice.

Is it wrong that humans might anthropomorphise nature? Is that against nature, or simply the next stage of its development. Cows, dogs and chickens fit into the modern world better than bison, wolverines and dodos. That is just evolution at work - now that evolution has taken on a further cultural-level dimension in the humancentric era of the anthropocene.

I mean I agree that the world is going to shit in plenty of ways. We can see a host of challenges converging that will make 2030 to 2050 a close run thing for civilisation.

But that is why philosophical clarity is paramount. We have to know what to actually worry about as our priorities. Cruelty to farm animals might be way down that moral list, for example.

Yes, I would agree that farming ought to be as kind as possible - given we've made these animals our moral dependents. That is the good middleclass view. But then how fast is artificial meat developing as the alternative? Maybe the real dilemma is what to do about all the soon to be struggling ranchers - the human cost of what could be a technologically-produced social shift. So in that view, we can shelve a problem soon to become a historic one so as to focus on the next issue which is quite liable to follow in its wake.

And again, letting civilisation collapse will surely only ensure great animal suffering, vast ecological damage. The dwindling band of survivors are not going to have many compunctions about exactly how they survive.

What we call the present--Isn't it really just the recent past and immediate future? No point trying to quantify its duration, as if it were a real distinct division into actual different periods.. — Michael Ossipoff

If you take the question to be about the maximum rate of change, then it makes sense.

So the present is commonly understood as the extent of the moment between the past and future. It is the instant when everything actually "exists" in some non-changed fashion. Things are momentarily fixed, suspended between a past that is some evolving history that is the causes of the events happening in the present, and the future where there are further possible changes, but those have yet to be actualised.

The present is thus our measure of actualisation or realisation. And it is imagined as being rather statically existent. There is a duration in which the actual is what is, and nothing else is changing. Then this actuality gets swept out of the present and into history once it itself becomes a cause of further actualities, the cause of further possibilities becoming realised.

So the question is really about how long does actuality endure in that present tense gap between first becoming stably real as an effect, a crystalisation of what had been a future possibility, and then stably real as itself a cause, or the now historic reason for further actualities.

Hierarchy theorist Stan Salthe dubs this the "cogent moment". Henri Bergson had a similar idea.

If the world is understood in terms of a hierarchy of processes, then they all will have their own characteristic integration times. Time for the Cosmos is not some Newtonian dimension. It is an emergent feature of being a process as every process will have a rate at which it moves from being just starting to form a settled state - reaching some sort of cogent equilibrium which defines it as having "happened" - and then being in fact settled enough to become the departure point, the cause, for further acts of integration or equilibration.

So this view of time sees it not as a spatial line to be divided in two - past and future - with the present being some instant or zero-d point marking a separation. Instead, time is an emergent product of how long it takes causes to become effects that are then able to be causes. For every kind of process, there is going to be a characteristic duration when it comes to how long it takes for integration or equilibration to occur across the span of the activity in question.

We can appreciate this in speeded up film of landscapes in which clouds or glaciers now look to flow like rivers. What seemed like static objects - changing too slowly to make a difference to our impatient eye - now turn into fluid processes. They looked like chunks of history. Now we see them as things very much still in the middle of their actualisation. They will be history only after they have passed, either massing and dropping their rain, or melting and leaving behind great trenches etched in the countryside.

So the present is our intuitive account of the fact that causes must be separated from their effects, and the effects then separated from what they might then cause. There is some kind of causal turnaround time or duration - a momentary suspension of change - that is going to be a physical characteristic of every real world process. Thus there is some rate of change, some further "time frame" or cogent moment, that gets associated with every kind of natural system.

At the level of fundamental physics, this turns out to be the Planckscale limit. Time gets "grainy" at around 10^-44 seconds. The Planck distance is 10^-35m. So the Planck time represents the maximum action that can be packed into such a tiny space - the single beat of a wavelength. That primal act of integrated change - a single oscillation - then also defines the maximum possible energy density, as the shortest wavelength is the highest frequency, and the highest frequency is the hottest possible radiation.

So the shortest time, the smallest space, and the most energetic event, all define each other in a neat little package. Actuality is based on the rate at which a thermal event can come together and count as a "first happening" - a concrete Big Bang act of starting to cool and expand enough to stand as a first moment in a cosmic thermal history.

Then psychological time for us humans is all about neural integration speed. It takes time for nerve signals to move about. The maximum conduction speed in a well-insulated nerve, like the ones connecting your foot to your brain is about 240 mph. But inside the brain, speeds can slow to a 20 mph crawl. To form the kind of whole brain integrated states needed by attentional awareness involves developing a collective state - a "resonance" - that can take up to half a second because of all the spread-out activity to become fully synchronised.

So there is a characteristic duration for the time it takes for causes to become the effects that are then themselves causes. Input takes time to process and become the outputs that drive further behaviour. Which is why I mention also the importance of bridging this processing gap by anticipation. The brain shortcuts itself as much as it can by creating a running expectation of the future. It produces an output before the input so that it can just very quickly ignore the arriving information - treat it as "already seen". It is only the bit that is surprising that then takes that further split second to register and get your head around.

But between this physical Planckscale integration time and this neural human information processing time are a whole host of other characteristic timescales for the processes of nature.

Geology has its own extremely long "present tense". Stresses and strains can slowly build for decades or centuries before suddenly relaxing in abrupt events like earthquakes or volcanoes.

Here is a good visual chart of the integration time issue in biology - http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(16)30208-2.pdf?_returnURL=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867416302082%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

The philosophy of time is still very much hung up on the old Newtonian model, where time is some global spatialised dimension, and St Augustine's psychological model of time, where it is now somehow all a subjectively-projected illusion.

There is some truth in both these views. The brain does have to construct duration. The Cosmos does have a characteristic global rate in terms of its thermal relaxation - the one described by c as a Planck constant.

But a process view explains time in a more general fashion by relating it to the causal structure of events. Every system has some characteristic rate of change. There is a cogent moment graininess or scale created by the fact that not everything can be integrated all at once. It requires "time" to go from being caused to being a cause. There is a real transition involved. And that happens within what we normally regard as the frozen instant when things are instead finally just "actual". That is, brutely existent and lacking change, not being in fact a transition from being caused to being a cause in terms of our multi-scale accounts of causal flows.

I didn't stress it, but I include the failure of the body in the problem of death. We don't usually just drop dead. Things fall apart first. The vitality we took for granted seeps away. — ff0

I agree. Getting old, it is decrepitude and its many indignities that are the live issue. Death becomes a solution more than a threat.

But then unnecessary longevity is such a recent thing too. A relatively new topic for the philosophisers. At least I've not yet noticed any modern Heidegger making a thing of humans being the only animals conscious of their own imminent gerontocracy.

Decay lacks the profundity, the finality, which we are so quick to grant death.

Some of life's beauty lies in the death of all things. — ff0

The biological perspective is my thing. So I really like the idea that life is like riding a bicycle, or the tilt of the sprinter.

We hang together on the edge of falling apart by flinging ourselves constantly forward. The beauty of living lies in this constant mastery over a sustaining instability. We stay in motion to keep upright. Then eventually we slow and it all falls apart.

So there is a self-making pattern. Individuals come and go, but the pattern always renews. And it is the possibility of the material instability that is the basis for the possibility of the formal control. Life is falling apart given a sustaining direction for a while.

But we might also speak of attaining a kind of emotional equilibrium, of making peace with death or 'evil,' etc. Of living and dying well. — ff0

I'm thinking of those as applied philosophy. So the answers are not so much to be found as invented. And a science - like positive psychology - is the place to be watching the technology coming through.

So the practical issue is that religious teachings and philosophical wisdom did try to create good life advice. But it was advice for a different world, a different time. A lot of it may have been particular to life as most people might have lived it 2000 years ago. Some deep principles may still apply. But also, a scientific, evidence-backed and conjectural approach, might be the better way to philosophise about "living well" today.

So the modern way of thinking recognises that the human project is subject to nature's constraints. We are evolved and that shapes our ideas about any personal or collective purpose. It is foolish now to believe that we are either radically free of this biological conditioning, or that alternatively, we are conditioned by some divine telos.

Of course, both those comments will be immediately disputed. But that's my position here. Philosophy is wasting its time - in terms of deliverables - if it is still seeking answers on the moral, the aesthetic, the human, in terms that either deny a biological history or claim a divine basis. So what philosophy would focus on productively is how to make sense of the freedoms we discover, given a history of natural constraints.

We've still got lots of choices. And we are so busy doing stuff, changing things, that we need to get scientific about the ultimate goals we might be wanting to achieve. We need to investigate our psychology well enough to have a credible story about what actually makes us happy, allows us to flourish, leads us towards the nirvana of self-actualisation - if that is indeed all the things we would freely choose for ourselves in the long run.

In short, between the moral absolutism and the moral relativism that is the polar dichotomy characterising most people's understanding of the philosophical choices, I am arguing for the moral pragmatism which takes the middle course of recognising reality to be historically conditioned, yet also semiotically open-ended. There is a practical balance of opposing tensions waiting to be struck. And the scientific method is what you apply once you start to zero in on a fully account of anything.

But perhaps you neglect the position of the mortal individual with a particular history. You mention the individual pole in passing, but don't have much to say about it, which is fine. But what of the individual who comes to term with his smallness on the world stage? With the impotence of his notion of the way the world ought to be? Born into a kind of chaos, he will die in it. Also it seems fair to expect the species itself to go extinct. — ff0

Is mortality more something you worry about when you are old or when you are young? Life seems to provide its own perspective on these things.

On their deathbed, most people regret not spending more quality time with family, friends and passions. A life devoted to striving and achievement seems unbalanced in retrospect. The cultivation of the individuated self - the idea of making one big difference to society rather than a lot of small differences for those closest at hand - seems overblown at the far end of life. For quite natural reasons. Just as it seems the most important thing of all back at the start of adult life.

So should the futility of life, the inevitability of death, be the final philosophy of "a good life"? The evidence of living suggests that what looms large at the beginning becomes naturally more inconsequential towards the end.

In short, we operate within a sort of finitude and absurdity, granting these assumptions. We are future-oriented beings with long-term projects and social hopes. Yet projecting far enough ahead reveals a kind of futility. This is a fascinating situation. — ff0

I've got to agree as I've felt it too. And I think finding it "fascinating" speaks to a suitably balanced assessment.

Life is both futile and worthwhile, both absurd and meaningful. And this isn't paradoxical, just an expression of the range of possible philosophical reactions we have learnt to manifest. We feel the full space of the possible - in a way that a lack of philosophy would render inarticulate.

And that in itself is both fascinating and unsettling.

So the only problem with philosophy is that once you have habituated its dialectical tendencies, they infect everything you could think about. Once you create range, you always then have the dilemma of locating yourself at some definite point on the spectrum you've just made.

The alternative to that is to float above your own spectrum of possibilities in some detached and free-floating manner. Which is where "you" start becoming a highly abstract kind of creature even to "yourself".

Do I care? Do I not care? At every moment I could just as easily make a different choice on that.

Thank goodness life provides its social scripts that "one" can always grab hold of, so as to decide the matter for the passing moment, eh? Ah, the existentialism of being an existentialist. ;)

Ufology seems just so ... 1990s. Contemporary conspiracy theory is focused on the Deep State or Hollywood's bearding phenomenon.

It also seems foundational to clarify the goal. — ff0

Of course. And the general goal of philosophy or critical thinking would be something along the lines of "arriving at the truth of reality". But even that could be disputed by those who claim it to be akin to an exercise in poetry or whatever.

Yet also, I was talking about productive agreement as being the general social goal. And society seems an exercise in creativity.

A society's goals are founded in nature - the demands of evolutionary fitness and thermodynamical imperative. Or at least those are nature's constraints on our being. They set the general limits, and within that scope, we are free to play. We can set our own goals from there on. Nature is in agreement with whatever we choose to do from the point where it thinks that any differences don't make a difference.

And so the goal of the human project is reasonably open-ended and emergent within those physical limits. Our job is make sense of the freedoms we find. Or at least that is one possible philosophical view of the foundational goals of a social creature.

But even outright war can inspire innovation. So there's that. — ff0

Yep. It is standard social science to point out that a flourishing social system depends on both competition and co-operation. So striving leads to creative advance.

But also, it is a balance. The implicit question here is whether a good war creates more than it destructs in terms of long-run social and intellectual capital?

So it is not a paradox that conflict is productive. It is the balance of strife to harmony that gets judged in the long-run as both are forms of productivity. Stability must be tempered by plasticity, etc. It's all part of nature's dialectic.

What is ideological about causation? About the laws of thermodynamics? What is ideological about "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." or Darwin's finches? or the first through fifth extinctions, now heading into the sixth? or the San Andreas or Madrid fault? or is this squirrel a hybrid or a separate species? Or climate change? What are the genes that contribute to invincible stupidity? — Bitter Crank

What could be more ideological than claiming that the facts of the world are not subject to ideology?

Such absoluteness is the very hallmark of the ideal.

Seems like total agreement has no need for creative compromise. — ff0

Total agreement rules out any scope for differences of opinion, hence freedom and creativity. So that is why I would stress productive agreement - the kind of agreement that pragmatist philosophy would have in mind.

The foundation of productive agreement would be agreeing about what kind of differences don't in fact matter. And that approach to discovering truth is the opposite of seeking agreement based on starting definitionally with the essence of things - the differences that make a difference.

So I am advocating an emergent or apophatic approach to arriving at agreement. As we agree about what doesn't change things, then what does change things will emerge into view with any luck.

What may be usefully found in a philosophy text, though... — ff0

Hah. Philosophy in a nutshell - the art of productive disagreement. Everything said becomes the departure point of its own possible contradictions. :)

Whereas living a life as a social creature is mostly about productive agreements....

So, how are those countries pulling these enviable things off, of spending large sums of money on social welfare programs and at the same time maintaining their high HDI and low Gini coefficients? — Posty McPostface

If you invest in your people, then you will prosper as a nation. Seems obvious. And universal health care and education are the most basic of those investments.

As a nation, your problem then is the competition. So if you are taking the long term view of your social capital - investing in it - and your competition is simply happy to strip-mine its social capital, then your "economic system" can seem ... uncompetitive.

As a welfare nation, you would have to find ways to avoid becoming too globalised - too exposed to those competitive forces happy to indulge in a race to the sweatshop bottom. And also seek to take advantage of your greater social capital by moving upstream in terms of the products and services you then export.

So rather than selling junk goods, the Danes or Germans are particularly good at making premium stuff.

An alternative is to be a historically wealthy country like the UK or France. Assets acquired in colonial times keep the wheels greased.

My question, I suppose, was more to do with where we find ourselves when the philosophy runs out. — Oliver Purvis

Would it make a difference if philosophy were simply renamed "critical thinking"? Folk may make the mistake of wanting answers when what it mostly teaches is a structure of good thought habits. By applying thinking to really extreme problems, dealing with everyday problems ought to be made easier.

More generally, if philosophy is functioning well, it ought to be the engine room of culture. So we might study it to learn its skills. And then as a social institution doing a job, it should be generating the wider view that defines the space of possibilities for society. It should articulate the alternatives rather than aim to solve the problems as such.

You seem to suggest that philosophy ought to be more like science - an evolving story of ever better theories. While philosophy ought to keep "improving", it is a more consciously historic exercise for good reason. Bad ideas and wrong turns are worth keeping alive in the institutional memory if the focus is on learning critical thinking skills and enlarging the space of the possible for cultural-level thought.

Then on the question of how philosophy relates to everyday living, I don't think it is that great as either some general life pursuit or self-help manual.

If you have some kind of deep curiosity about existence, then you are going to wind up wanting to scratch that itch. But also, there is a consequence. The cost of a critical thinking mindset is that living a life can become quite an abstract exercise. It can divert you away from actually living that life in a usefully balanced fashion. It can become an excuse not to properly engage. So if "living a good life" is the primary goal, then positive psychology or something more applied - even religion - is a better thing to invest your effort in.

Philosophy can take you out of yourself, propel you into the absolutely abstract. But I wouldn't rely on it to bring you back to yourself. We are social creatures, formed by our cultural actions. So we only find ourselves through the negotiations of actually living a life, not by chancing upon the right recipe in some philosophy text.

So short answer is that philosophy is absolutely central to cultural development. It was the institutionalised habit of critical thought that created the space of possibilities which then underwrote 2500 years of rapid social evolution.

And if you have a curiosity about existence bordering on the obsessive, then philosophy is the base camp for that expedition into the abstract.

But if you are troubled by life, then doing philosophy is not itself an answer. It could end up more isolating than helpful, unless it is balanced by some social and cultural actions as a result. The question is does it return you to the world in some useful fashion? If it is being used as a refuge from the world, then it is not in fact functioning very usefully.

It's weird, I experience a thudding sound, but I know it's not coming from my ears. — Marchesk

Do we experience any sounds coming from our ears? Our ears are a stereo system that help place sounds appropriately in space. So we hear sounds coming from the place they are likely being made.

With a gif, we are imagining the thudding sound. And the kinesthetic vibration in this case. So the stereo locatiing information is missing. But if you start focusing on the question of "where is the sound coming from", doesn't it start to come from the gif?

Maybe turn your head and look at the gif out of the corner of your eye. Doesn't it start to seem located?

In other words, what is the smallest amount of present time that can exist in order to differentiate the past and future? — JohnLocke

Time has a physical limit in that nothing could happen in less than the Planck time - 10^-44 seconds.

But then even physically to differentiate past and future gets complicated. You would have to start factoring in the time it takes light to travel and so bring news of a difference. It takes about 8 minutes for the light (and gravity) of the sun to affect the earth. So if the sun went supernova, our present wouldn't change until 8 minutes later.

Then if you are talking about psychological time, it takes about half a second to consciously integrate a change and so update our running image of "the present".

We don't really notice that processing lag because we can respond to quite complex events in a faster habitual fashion within a fifth of a second. And what smooths out our experience of "the present" even more is that we build an anticipatory sensory expectation ahead of every coming moment. So half a second out, we are already forming a prediction of what "the present" should feel like.

For instance, we know we are about to turn our head to look towards something. So already we are subtracting away the motion to our view that we are about to cause - it feels like we are turning rather than that the world is spinning. And we have an expectation of the general scene we should discover due to our familiarity through memory.

So the psychological present moment is not some instant snapshot deal but a complex neural construction that starts by us "peering into the future" and then "working out a settled interpretation of what just happened". It spreads itself out over at least a second and then "the present" is however it washed up according to our memory.

The smallest temporal discrimination we can make is much finer grain - down to 20ths of a second for sharp onset/offset stimuli where we are focused and know what to expect. Attention can do "post-processing" to identify a particular brief signal, but at the expense of then losing sight of whatever else was going on in that half second or so "frame".

A good example of just how grainy our time perception actually is, and how much it is dependent on interpretation or expectation, is the cutaneous rabbit experiment - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_rabbit_illusion

Hah. Your OP is flawed in taking it as intuitively obvious that we would want to be spacefaring. That’s hippie thinking. But it’s funny to see the same old dickheads still police physics forum. Russ and Evo are just deeply unhappy people. Intellectual wannabes. Laugh and move on.