Cheer up Schop. Take the long view. Either humanity will work out what it is about or your wish will be granted. You can wait 50 years surely?

Canopy succession is an example. Once a mighty oak has grown to fill a gap, it shades out the competition. So possibilities get removed. The mighty oak then itself becomes a stable context for a host of smaller stable niches. The crumbs off its feeding table are a rain of degrees of freedom that can be spent by the fleas that live on the fleas.

But if the oak gets knocked down in a storm or eaten away eventually by disease, that creates an opening for faster-footed weed species. We are back to a simpler immature ecosystem where the growth is dominated by the strong entropic gradient - the direct sunlight, the actual rainfall and raw nutrient in the soil.

The immature ecology doesn't support the same hierarchy of life able to live off "crumbs" - the weak gradients that highly specialised lifeforms can become adapted to. It doesn't have the same kind of symbiotic machinery which can trap and recycle nutrients, provide more of its own water, like the leaf litter and the forest humidity.

So the degrees of freedom are the system's entropy. It is the through-put spinning the wheels.

An immature ecology is dependent on standing under a gushing faucet of entropy. It needs direct sunlight and lots of raw material just happening to come its way. It feeds on this bounty messily, without much care for the long-term. Entropy flows through it in a way that leaves much of it undigested.

But a senescent ecology has build up the complexity that can internalise a great measure of control over its inputs. A tropical forest can depend on the sun. But it builds up a lot of machinery to recycle its nutrients. It fills every niche so that while the big trees grab the strongest available gradients, all the weak ones, the crumbs, get degraded too.

So the degrees of freedom refers both to the informational and entropic aspects of what is going on. Salthe is explicit about this in his infodynamic account of hierarchical complexity - the forerunner of what seems to have become biosemiosis.

The degrees of freedom fall out of the sky as a rain of entropy, an energy source that would welcome being guided towards some suitable sink. Life then provides that negentropic or informational structure. It becomes the organised path by which sunlight of about 6000 degrees is cooled to dull infra-red.

Then switching to that informational or negentropic side of the deal - the tale of life's dissipative structure - the degrees of freedom become the energy available to divert into orderly growth. It is the work that can be done to make adaptive changes if circumstances change.

A weed can sprout freely to fill a space. It is green and soft, not woody and hard. It remains full of choices in its short life.

An oak wins by trading that plasticity for more permanent structure. It grows as high and strong as it can. It invests in a lot of structure that is really just dead supporting wood.

So degrees of freedom have a double meaning here - which is all part of the infodynamic view of life as dissipative structure.

Life is spending nature's degrees of freedom in entropifying ambient energy gradients. And it spends its own degrees of freedom in terms of the work it can extract from that entropification - the growth choices that it can make in its ongoing efforts to optimise this entropy flow.

So there is the spending of degrees of freedom as in Boltzmann entropy production. Turning energy stores into waste heat. And also in terms of Shannon informational uncertainty. Making the choices that remove structural alternatives.

An immature system is quick, clever and clumsy. A senescent system is slow, wise and careful. An immature system spends energy freely and so always seems to have lots of choices available. A senescent system is economic with its energy spending, being optimised enough to be mostly in a mode of steady-state maintenance. And in knowing what it is about, it doesn't need to retain a youthful capacity to learn. Its degrees of freedom are already invested in what worked.

Which then brings us back to perturbations. Shit happens. The environment injects some unpredicted blast of entropy - a fresh rain of entropic degrees of freedom - into the system. The oak gets blown down and the weeds get their chance again.

a conservative ecology would be precisely a senescent one, one that, yes, acknowledges the need for 'community' and so on, but that doesn't valorize the changes that such community fosters (correlatively, a philosophy of individualism lies on the other side of the spectrum). The 'best' ecosystems are precisely those perched halfway between immaturity and senescene, insofar as they can accommodate change in the best way. — StreetlightX

Senescent is probably a bad word choice by Salthe as he means to stress that a climax ecology has become too well adapted to some particular set of environmental parameters. It has spent all its degrees of freedom to create a perfect fit, and so that makes it vulnerable to small steady fine-scale changes in those parameters outside its control - something like coral reefs collapsing as we cause changes in ocean temperature and acidity. Or else the perturbations can come from the other end of the scale - single epic events such as an asteroid strike or super-volcano.

So evolution drives an ecology to produce the most entropy possible. A senescent ecology is the fittest as it has built up so much internal complexity. It is a story of fleas, upon fleas, upon fleas. There are a hosts of specialists so that entropification is complete. Every crumb falling off the table is feeding someone. As an ecology, it is an intricate hierarchy of accumulated habit, interlocking negentropic structure. And then in being so wedded to its life, it becomes brittle. It loses the capacity to respond to the unpredictable - like those either very fine-grain progressive parameter changes or the out of the blue epic events.

So senescence isn't some sad decaying state. It is being so perfectly adapted to a set of parameters that a sudden breakdown becomes almost inevitable. Coz in nature, shit always happens. And then you struggle if you are stuck with some complicated set of habits and have lost too much youthful freedom to learn some new tricks.

One can easily draw economic and political parallels from this canonical lifecycle model. And it seems you want to make it so that conservatives equal the clapped out old farts, neoliberal individualists equal the reckless and immature, then the greeny/lefties are the good guys in the middle with the Goldilocks balance. They are the proper mature types, the grown-ups.

Well I'd sort of like to agree with that, but it is simplistic. :)

The left certainly values the co-operative aspect of the human ecosystem, while the greens value the spatiotemporal scope of its actions.

So conservatives certainly also value the co-operative aspects of society, but have a more rigid or institutionalised view. The rules have become fixed habits and so senescent even if a good fit to a current state. The left would instinctively take a sloppier approach as it would seem life is still changing and you need to still have a capacity for learning and adaptation in your structures of co-operativity.

Then conservatives also value the longer view of the parameters which constrain a social ecology. Like greens, they are concerned for the long-term view - one that includes the welfare of their great grand children, their estates, their livestock. But while greenies would be looking anxiously to a future of consequences, conservatives - in this caricature - are so set in their ways by a history of achieving a fit that the long-view is more of the past. It is what was traditionally right that still looks to point to any future.

But then conservatives may be the ones that don't rush into the future immaturely. The stability of their social mores may actually encode a long-run adaptiveness as the result of surviving past perturbations. Lefties and greenies can often seem the ones who are in the immature stage of being too eager for the turmoil of reforms, too quick to experiment in ways that are mostly going to pan-out as maladaptive, too much the promoters of a pluralist liberal individualism, too quick to throw history and hierarchy in the bin.

So as usual, the science of systems - of which ecology is a prime one - could really inform our political and economic thinking. It is the correct framework for making sense of humans as social creatures.

But once we start projecting the old dichotomous stereotypes - left vs right, liberal vs conservative - then that misses the fact a system is always a balancing act of those kinds of oppositional tensions.

And we also have to keep track of what is actually different about an ecology and a society. An ecology lacks any real anticipatory ability. It only reacts to what is happening right now as best it can, using either its store of developed habits to cope, or spending the capital of its reserve of degrees of freedom to develop the necessary habits.

But a human society can of course aspire to be anticipatory. It can model the future and plan accordingly. It can remember the past clearly enough to warn it of challenges it might have to face. It can change course so as to avoid perturbations that become predictable due to long-range planning.

And the jury is actually out on how an intelligent society ought to respond. On climate change, the conservatives were at first the ones worried about its potential to disrupt the story of human progress. Then the neoliberal attitude took over where the strategy for coping with the future is to rely on human ingenuity and adaptability.

One view says tone everything down as we are too near the limit. The other says if shit is always going to happen - if not global warming, then the next overdue super-volcano ice age - the imperative is to go faster, generate more degrees of freedom. The planet is just not ever going to be stable, so to flourish, planned immaturity beats planned senescence.

Both views makes sense. As does the further view that of course there must be a balance of these two extremes. The right path must be inbetween.

As far as your snark, it's not necessary. — fishfry

Give snark and you get snark. Fair enough?

Philosophically it's perfectly valid that you have alternative ideas about math and don't accept parts of standard modern math. But physics is most definitely based on standard modern math; and to the extent that your outlook diverges from that, you are introducing confusion into the conversation. — fishfry

Even in philosophy of maths, these are routine debates. And physics doesn't base itself on the "correctness" of maths. So you may feel confused by conversations that veer of the beaten textbook track, but there is no particular reason to think the secrets of reality are already written in those textbooks. The relationship between maths and physics is much more subtle than that.

So look, I am interested in what you have to say about standard views within mathematics. It is good that you can explain the structures of justification upon which certain mathematical positions are constructed. But if you just want to lecture on the correct methods of the academy - the stuff that will get you a pass in class - I don't really call that a conversation in the context of a philosophy forum where the thread is about the material reality of multiverses.

For the record I do understand that you have your own private notation and that you reject the standard notation of modern math, on which physics is based. Is that a fair assessment? — fishfry

Hardly. I'm quite happy to accept more than one way of doing anything. And happy also that the standard way will have proven itself to be the most pragmatic in finding the simplest path - the one that disposes of the most metaphysical baggage.

But when we are talking about how existence itself comes to be, as we are with multiverses, then that is when the axioms upon which a reductionist simplicity is founded come into metaphysical question. That is when we have to rewind and see what was being left out, or being assumed, when starting down that path.

But since we're doing physics, it's important to make sure we get the math right. — fishfry

Err, no. It is important to get the physics right and then find the right maths to make those ideas precise enough to measure.

I'm not denying that physics and maths enjoy a remarkably fruitful relation. But I do deny your understanding of how science works. The maths does not lead, it follows. And the fact that the maths then works as the precise description of the scientific claims merely shows that the maths has been suitably fitted to the task in hand. The maths was convenient.

But that's exactly wrong. You need a finite die with a very large number of faces. One for each admissible state of all the particles in some bounded region of space. — fishfry

So why did you introduce the blather about binary coin flips where you either got Earth or Mars in the course of some infinite sequence? That was the misstep I was addressing.

Of course I understood the ergodic argument that motivates the talk of repeating outcomes in a multiverse of infinite spatial extent. You were the one who had to go look it up.

And of course I understood the ridiculousness of the idea of a spherical die that could be said to "land on 1 of its infinite number of sides". It was your coin-flipping nonsense I was lampooning. Exactly which infinitesimal point are we suppose to say a sphere has landed?

Now you are talking about a finite sided die with enough degrees of freedom to represent every thermal microstate in a bounded space. As if this fixes either your blather about Earth/Mars coin-flipping sequences, or deals with my actual objections to the simplicities of the correlation-less ergodic view of nature.

Imagine your finite side die had dependencies between the faces so that all the Earth-like combos are clustered together on one neighbourhood of the die, not represented randomly across the die surface.

Perhaps now you can start to see the mathematical presumptions you are failing to take account of in attempting to construct some physical model of a "multiverse generator"? A fair die would scramble the microstates randomly. But a die more properly representing the material world, with its dependencies and entangled history, would already be built in a way that was pre-loaded. It would either fall somewhere in the neighbour where the many Earth-like outcomes were clustered - or mostly somewhere not anything like the Earth at all.

That should be blindingly obvious. Yet it's not because the idea of modelling probability spaces with correlations is not so "mainstream".

But I have zero expectation you will pick up on such a point and argue it through. You are way too intent on finding an ever higher horse from which to look down your nose at any "non-mathematician".

Why don't we agree not to interact? I was really surprised earlier that you directly replied to something I said. I don't think our interactions are productive. — fishfry

I'm amused and entertained. I'm finding the dispute productive. What more could I wish for? I'm not complaining.

As it happens I've spent the afternoon chasing down ergodicity. — fishfry

Hmm. "Ergodic" in this context is really talking about Poincare reccurence -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem

In an ideal gas, the particles will recross their initial conditions in the long run.

But my counter has been that the universe is more like a box of gas with its lid off. The particles are all escaping as the Universe is expanding/cooling. The locations they might want to recross may well have moved over an event horizon forever.

And then even worse, the gas is far from ideal. All the particles have correlations or dependencies. At the least, gravity and other forces are in play. So a different maths is needed to make any multiverse extrapolations.

Think more of a chaotic attractor where the trajectories could go anywhere within the bounds of the phase space, yet also cluster ... because of the internal dependencies. The system is not random but emergently self-constrained - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor

There is no such thing as a probability of 1/infinity. — fishfry

You do get your knickers in a twist with great rapidity. As you know, that was Michael's terminology. I went along with it for the sake of discussion.

But also, 1/infinity is the proper definition of the infinitesimal as far as I'm concerned. Now you will get on your high horse and object no doubt. But I went along with Michael's terminology largely because I also like that sly implication. It is another way of getting across that the probability ain't actually zero even if it is almost surely zero when it comes to an infinite spatial universe producing replica earths with replica people doing replica things.

When people are talking about an infinitely-sided die, I assume they mean a countable infinity, which has no uniform probability distribution. — fishfry

If you remember, it was you who introduced the confusion. I was trying to sort it out for you by pointing out that those would be the kind "coins" you would need to be flipping...

If there are two states and infinitely many universes they could be 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ...

If 0 is the "earth" state, there is no other earth. 1 is maybe Mars. So Mars exists infinitely many times but not earth. If there are a trillion states, same argument. SOME state recurs infinitely many times, but not necessarily any particular state. Maybe there's only one earth even though there are infinitely many copies of Mars. It's perfectly possible. — fishfry

This still reads as nonsense to me. Maybe you agree now as you seem to have discovered ergodicity and moved on to a notion of a universe chopped up into sufficiently large but finite regions - the ensemble of microstates picture that I also have been at pains to criticise.

Nonsense? I think it really gets us to the heart of some really telling confusion.

This is a philosophy discussion group. When things seem unarguably right, that's when you know there must be the whole flip-side to the story. Dialectics always rules. So someone's nonsense is always the start of someone else's sense.

Having an infinite number of every planet is no more likely than having an infinite number of just one planet. — Michael

If the odds of earth being the case on any one roll are 1 in infinity, then the odds of earth being the case every time in an infinite series of rolls are 1 in an infinity of infinities.

If you just reduce this to a consideration of the statistics of a one off event - as is the case with the multiverse argument - then you must take a propensity view of the statistics. We should presume typicality for the outcome.

We are talking about a known outcome - the visible universe and the variety of planets if produces. We know what typicality looks like to a reasonable degree. You get gas giants, you get Mercuries, you get Earth-like planets. We are busy counting that variety around other stars now.

We also then have at least some grasp on the propensity for intelligent life arising on other planets. And we can keep tacking on propensity estimates for the history of an earth repeating such that it produces humans who are exactly, atom-for-atom, thought-for-though, like you and me, doing replica actions for as long into the future as this multiverse calculation requires. (Is it still a real multiverse if all the other replica Earths do a Boltzmann Brain disappearing or disintegrating act in the next split second? How long must that exact continuity of a history persist?)

So the actual situation for a multiverse "just one throw of a die" propensity calculations is that being "Earth-like" in the vague way astrobiologists have in mind is reasonably typical. There are many ways to be Earth-like. So it happens a lot. Even inside our visible universe.

Then harbouring Earth-like life is way less typical. How typical the biology of the Earth is - as an outcome of the physics and constraints of the universe - is an open question. Recent work - like Nick Lane's The Vital Question - is arguing that the ways life can biochemically develop are surprisingly limited. So the odds of Earth-like biology now seem much higher - if life develops on other planets at all.

Then we have the question of the typicality of a re-run of the Homo sapiens story down to the level of historic accident that produces you, me, and the rest of PF. The level of accident, the level of information discarded, argues for some extremely low propensity. I would say "almost never". Or probability = 0.

You thus run into a collision between two notions of the infinite. The combinatorial one says every possible combination simply gets realised. The constraints based one says the steady shrinking towards an infinite unlikelihood means you are headed towards almost never, a probability that is actually zero (fine print: for all practical purposes). That is, the principle of indifference kicks in to allow the state of infinite constraint to be achieved.

One notion of infinity operates on an already closed and bounded set. The other has to achieve that claimed closure.

So as I tried to point out, the simple minded combinatorial notion of infinity employed to motivate multiverse arguments is itself in question. It depends on the assumption of a bounded space with no internal correlations. That gives you one picture of what "infinity" means.

And then the more appropriate notion is a constraints-based infinity where the correlations get counted too. Restrictions on what is typical arise due to histories. Material accidents and formal necessities go into making those histories. The story in irreducibly complex and non-linear.

The propensities of Earth-like biology might be much higher than naive combinatrics would predict, if we buy Nick Lane's arguments about the biophysical constraints on life forming. But then the propensity of Homo sapien history being exactly repeated to the point of producing doppleganger you and me, is way less than naive combinatrics would predict.

But even if we put aside the difference between a combinatorial statistics and a constraints-based, negentropy-including, one, you are still only dealing with a one-off propensity story with the multiverse argument. Unless you can motivate the further idea of a multiverse of multiverses, we are only talking about a one time "roll of the dice" so far as there was a Big Bang that produce an infinite amount of spatial regions, all with the same propensity for star and planet formation.

The typicality is wired in just by observation. We have a sample size of the solar system, and now the solar systems of other stars. Already that is a constraint we can't just ignore (as good Bayesians).

But the very description of the die to be tossed - this spherical die with its infinity of marked faces - demands we assign a Bayesian propensity to the typicality of its outcomes. We already must "know" that it is going to generate the statistically typical, not the statistically infinitely unlikely. The only way we could think different is if we imagine an infinity of infinite throws. Then our propensity switches to thinking it almost sure that the 1 in infinity outcome would be among all the combinations that happen. Now, it couldn't not ... for all practical purposes.

To sum up, the multiverse scenario I was addressing only permits a one-shot propensity view. It was about the likelihoods within a single infinite Big Bang space.

Then a simple combinatrics view - the one that counts only entropy or degrees of freedom - would give you a naive number for how many times some exact combination of atoms and thoughts could appear in just such an infinite space.

But I argued that simple combinatrics is simply going to be wrong. A realistic calculation of the odds has to include correlations and the emergent constraints on combinations that will result.

If that propensity calculation could be done correctly, my gut feeling is that the probability of that propensity would shrink towards zero, or almost surely not, even with the infinity of a multiverse to play with. The magic of infinity would lose its power to conjure up every possibility.

The big "if" is doing that particular calculation. But I think Scott Aaronson provides some of the right conceptual tools here - https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

You are just ignoring the fact that your scenario demands an infinite creation of multiverses. That is different from figuring the odds of repeated configurations within just the one multiverse with “a fair die”.

There is nothing to motivate your assumption that the one multiverse would be so atypical. A multiverse with a die that produced your selective outcome could not be believed to be random. There would be no proper basis for such a presumption. It would be mad not to believe the die was loaded.

So nice try, but no dice.

Oh, and to shoehorn in a point of politics, it might be argued, on the basis of the above, that philosophies of rugged individualism are thus philosophies of ecological infantalism, or else ecological sickness. — StreetlightX

If you are interested in the best account of this, try Stan Salthe’s story on the immature-mature-senescent arc of living systems. And it would account for social systems as well.

But your hope to tie rugged individualism to sick or infantile ecology is lefty nonsense.

A senescent ecology is just one so well adapted to a particular life that it becomes brittle, lacking in degrees of freedom to recover from perturbations.

An immature one by contrast can exuberantly spend degrees of freedom to recover from knockbacks, yet is rather wasteful in being not yet well adapted to some particular life.

You can cash that out in sociological and political terms. But not so crudely as you seem to want to suggest.

Jeez, you were serious?

The odds of landing on the face marked Earth might be 1/∞. The odds of landing on the face marked Earth an infinite number of times in a row is another matter. It could only be 1/∞ in relation to an infinite ensemble of multiverse creations. So in a multiverse of multiverses, you would almost surely get your one multiverse in which every planet wound up being replica Earth, faithful down to us speaking in Korean about flower arranging, or whatever other modal possibility we could imagine.

I agree that presuming infinity entails any madness you care to suggest. But first, you would have to motivate this new tale of yours about multiverses of multiverses where a random process can then turn out its most unlikely possible result with certainty.

It might not. It might land on one face an infinite number of times. It might have been Mars all the way down. — Michael

That would be helluva loaded dice. Get you banned from the cosmic casino for sure. It just wouldn’t fit the description of being random.

And if every planet in the universe could have been replica Mars, then we would be Mars. Venus and Saturn would be Mars. So at least we can rule your hypothesis out observationally.

Each of your regions would contain about 10^120 degrees of freedom. That would be the entropy content of a Hubble radius. So, naively, we would be talking about the chances of one configuration of that magnitude being exactly repeated.

The odds against it are vast, yet finite. So granting an infinite array of such volumes, the configuration would repeat just by accident. Indeed it would occur an unlimited number of times.

Of course, a replica earth with a replica you and me would seem to require even more information to specify it. But even if we toss in another million orders of magnitude to allow for a more negentropic story - one that includes all the information discarded in the course of some evolutionary history - infinity will still ensure that all possible arrangements of finite regions with finite contents must repeat their configurations. It is just a consequence of the atomistic description of the set up.

I’m not a fan of this ergodic analysis. As I’ve indicated, I think it fails to take into account the negentropy of information discarded through interactions. It presumes every degree of freedom is independent. Yet in the real world, particles have dependencies. They interact. And that leads to non linearities that evolve in exponential time rather than polynomial time. In short, the complexity of an actual Hubble volume would grow at a rate that the simple statistical picture cannot even follow.

But if we do treat a Hubble volume as if it is just filled by an ideal gas, then ergodic simplicity applies. The multiverse argument carries if the ontology is atomistic.

Imagine the universe when it just was a gas of radiation, or even a dust of weakly interacting particles. You could go into deep space right now and sample cubic metres of vacuum. Each will average about a dozen hydrogen atoms. Even within our own visible universe, you would think you would get exact repeats - the same configuration of a cubic metre of vacuum.

So the multiverse argument is very straight forward in itself. The flaw would be in its assumptions. Like the willingness to discount interactions and the fact they may screw up any simple statistical extrapolations with their non-polynomial complexity.

If there are two states and infinitely many universes they could be 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ... — fishfry

Yeah. But you get to pick these infinite sequences out of an infinite hat. So you would pick that exact sequence an infinite number of times.

If 0 is the "earth" state, there is no other earth. 1 is maybe Mars. So Mars exists infinitely many times but not earth. — fishfry

But now you are changing the rules of your own game. Instead of Earth = 0, not-Earth = 1, you are saying reality only has the two options of Earth or Mars. And for some reason, nothing else will get pulled out of the hat.

Furthermore, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ... has the same probability as 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... . So those exact sequences are equally improbable. The typical sequence will be more like 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, ... And what interpretation are you assigning to that in terms of physical outcomes?

Maybe there's only one earth even though there are infinitely many copies of Mars. It's perfectly possible. — fishfry

Your maths doesn't give that result as I've argued. You are trying to hardwire in the restriction that Earth or Mars is the binary choice that reality is having to toss a coin on. But this is about a coin with an infinity of faces - one for every possible state of the world. And it gets toss an infinity of times, so lands on every one of those faces an infinite number of times.

The multiverse is pure madness in other words. And maybe that ought to give pause to any Cantorians round about these parts. Maybe the maths version of infinity is not that robust either? Heh, heh.

it has never been a really alien concept that there are undetectable portions of our universe. — noAxioms

No. That was indeed necessary to explain how a Big Bang universe could be so remarkably thermally homogenous. And before that, just to resolve Olbers paradox.

Are those places other universes? Not like they're discreet with boundaries where one stops and the next starts. — noAxioms

I agree they are not other universes. And even if our known Big Bang universe with its light cone structure were spatially infinite, then I still think important constraints on the "modal realist" version of the multiverse will count.

So spatial infinity would seem to guarantee that there should be an infinity of Earths where you and me are having this exact discussion - plus every other even faintly similar or utterly different interactions. We could be discussing hair-do's, speaking in Korean, typing random sequences. And the fact any of those might be the case would mean that all those varieties of cloned Earths would have to be infinite in number themselves. There would be an infinite number of replica planets with us speaking Korean, etc.

There just is no end to the madness once you let actual infinity run riot in your ontology.

MWI suffers this because it can't in fact define what causes a branch universe to form. It tries to confine the branching to stuff like simple spin-up/spin-down entanglements. But that is way too ad hoc as it stands. Every photon emission in history could just as well have landed up being absorbed anywhere in the future eternal visible universe. Try extracting the decohered thermal signal from that.

Anyway, even in a spatially infinite universe, we would presume that it all expands and cools in the same way. And cooling steadily - or in fact, exponentially - removes material possibilities. If every portion of the universe is losing energy density at a shared rate, that means there is only a tiny time window for replica earths to actually form.

So the Universe might have infinite space to play with, but a very finite amount of time. Now the madness of infinity means there will still be an infinite number of worlds where we are saying all this in Korean, etc, but infinitely less than there could have been because of a strict time constraint.

If nothing else, there will be infinitely more space between each of these supposed exact replicas. You would have to travel infinitely further to get that kind of big surprise.

Well perhaps not infinitely, literally. But near enough FAPP. :)

Well, only if the space was smaller than the hubble-sphere — noAxioms

Agreed. But any kind of topology could be screened off in that fashion with a sufficiently small hubble radius.

Anyway, I see now that SophistiCat rather confused things by talking about a toroid rather than spherical geometry. The simplest compact space that would make the point about the Universe being "finitely infinite" would be a sphere.

The story would then not change no matter how big your hubble factor. Or at least not until all that escaping light came back at you from the opposite direction. :)

I play asteroids in a flat 2-torus space, not on the surface of a donut embedded in three-space. — noAxioms

Apologies. I thought your mention of a torus was a typo. Didn't realise it had been introduced into the thread. If we lived in a 3-torus, we would be able to detect that global alignment as you say. We could get places quicker, with less energy, by going in one direction rather than another.

But I think the 'self-organising relations' idea is not from Peirce, but from 20th century organic chemistry - Prigogine, Kauffmann, and the like. — Wayfarer

You might be surprised. Peirce was Harvard's top of the class for his first degree in chemistry. He was up with the thermodynamics of his time.

So yes, self-organisation has only become real maths since computers showed up to make the calculations tractable, reveal that complex natural patterns really do emerge from simple rules or constraints. But Peirce was already talking about the mysterious self-organising properties of protoplasm. He was looking for a proper account of nature's "vitality". He already could see that Darwinian natural selection could only explain the removal of variety, not its creation. He was already a believer in tychism or productive spontaneity.

By the way, I don't know if you noticed but Kauffman was one of the authors on the QM paper I mentioned earlier. — Wayfarer

Sure, I too am arguing the point that the potential is real. That's Peirce's Firstness or Anaximander's Apeiron.

But the trick is to get the ontic structure right. You can't just have a good old simple duality like the potential and the actual. You need a Peircean triad, or hierarchical relation, where actuality is the hylomorphic meat in the sandwich. It emerges due to the interaction of the potential with the necessary. Or the interaction of material possibility and formal constraints, in other words.

He rejected Cartesian dualism, to be sure, but I don't think it's equally obvious that he rejected idealist metaphysics tout courte. — Wayfarer

In the end, if he was a genuine god-botherer, it doesn't make any difference to the ontic structure that is his legacy. But even the most theistic reading of his writings won't find a traditional theist.

You may get that impression because Peirce clearly puts the ideal at the top of the hierarchy. Physical law is "a habit of interpretance". It is interpretation all the way down as nature does not have atomistically material underpinnings. Drill down and you only get quantum vagueness.

So if anything creates reality, it is some kind of "mind" or interpretive process.

You can see that as affirmation of a theistic worldview if you like, or even another way of talking about Plato's realm of form. But really, it is incredibly more radical than that.

My only real point of divergence with you, is that you seem to think the whole process is fundamentally physical, still, whereas I think in the overall scheme of things, matter is not causative - in other words, it can't be truly 'self-organising'. — Wayfarer

But we agree that the material "stuff" drops right out of things. So this is a physicalism in which we see only constraints all the way down. The material bit is just a vague potential that gets shaped or excited in some direction.

So yes, I am fundamentally physicalist in thinking that the connection between formal and material cause must be there. These are the two halves of the equation. We can't just turn one or other side into some monistic ground like realism and idealism want to do.

But that is about as far as my "materialism" goes. I mean I'm even rejecting any notion of "mind" or "divine" which just presumes them to be "other kinds of stuff".

A bit off topic, but I've always noted that the orientation of the three spatial axes (X, Y, and Z) is arbitrary. If there is an actual x axis, which way is it? But if the universe is a 3-torus, all three axes have a preferred orientation, and this defines a preferred frame as well, even if not an inertial one. If the spatial axes are fixed, the temporal one, orthogonal to the others, is fixed as well.
This is only a minor violation of the principle of relativity, but it galls me enough to discount the significant probability of such a finite topology. — noAxioms

The three axes are orthogonal. So not arbitrary but fixed by this exact relation to each other. They don't need to be fixed in terms of some larger "space" any more than the curvature of 3-sphere surface needs to "flex" or "swell" within an embedding space.

Goedel and Mach explored these issues pretty thoroughly. If the Universe was tied to three constant axes as you seem to imagine, then it could also as a whole have a rotation. And that would be a little awkward.

You seem to have a very biased picture of what MWI is. All it states is that any closed system evolves according to Schrodinger's equation. — noAxioms

I have no problem with decoherence as a formalism that describes the time evolution of the probability of sets of observables. As such, it "safely" sidesteps pretty much everything of ontological concern.

But folk want to know if it is really "me" who gets split in a way that "I" can't notice just to make this mathematical account work. So once MWIers start saying yes, we just have to accept any old weirdness the maths implies, then the interpretation bit comes into play.

Tom/Odo is pushing the justification that "simplicity" warrants us making this further interpretive leap. I point out how there is nothing simple about it at all. The simplicity is merely a fact of quantum theory doing things like presuming the existence of time, presuming the definiteness of initiating observables, presuming some entropy-less notion of observers.

Any formalism is going to be simple if you chuck out enough reality. :)

So I am all for decoherence - QM+statistical mechanics. It is the claim that MWI is simply "the maths sans interpretation" which is the sly stunt that I'm objecting to here.

So you are fine to say the same object can have the two locations at the one time?

Cool. We're making progress.

The 100% similar obeys the principle of indifference. The weirdness of the quantum is coming into sight.

The 'triadic relation' of Peirce's semiotics is between sign, thing signified, and interpreter. I will never understand how, in the absence of mind, there can be 'an interpreter'. — Wayfarer

The point about semiosis is that Peirce worked out a fundamental notion of self-organising relations that could apply both to "the mind" and to "the world". Philosophy had become broken by a duality - realism vs idealism - and he picked it up and put it back together. He showed how the material and the immaterial could be related via the mediation of "a sign".

So it was a deflationary and universalising move. It accepted that reality is formed by becoming fundamentally divided. All our talk about the real vs the ideal, the material vs the immaterial, wasn't simply hot air.

But then Peirce was the one who made sense of it by pointing to the third thing which is the sign that mediates this epistemic cut. The end of one thing could be the beginning of the other. Where materiality left off and found its dimensional limit - the zero entropic dimensions of "a mark" - then that is exactly where immateriality could pick up and get started on its interpretive or modelling game.

So it is like origami perhaps - the point at which twists or folds serve to translate from one realm to the other. A flat piece of paper at some point becomes a swan or fox.

Now you can keep insisting that interpretance = mind. But surely Peirce would have called interpretance the interpreter if he meant to reify the semiotic process in that fashion. Remember, he was trying to fix the subject~object dualism of philosophy with his holistic triadism, not simply perpetuate it in some more obscure and complex way.

Peirce was generalising the notion of interpretance to the point where really you could see how if could be a material or physical process. You could see that even the Comos was a pan-semiotic development.

So it would be ironic if you claim to be arguing for the validity of generalisations - agreeing they are real - and yet denying Peirce's rather absolute metaphysical generalisation of whatever people might mean by "mind"

Which is good, because contemporary physics holds that the universe is finite. — fishfry

The contemporary view would seem to be more subtle than simply that the Comos is "finitely infinite" like the surface of a sphere.

The spacetime sphere is also a material thing. It both expands and cools in reciprocal measure. So in some sense, the surface is thinning as fast as it is growing. The maths has to represent that fact. And so the area of the sphere is now measured entropically in terms of an event horizon with some ultimate number of bits.

Making it really tricky, to actually arrive at some future finite Heat Death or entropy limit requires the further thing of a cosmological constant or dark energy. The geometry of spacetime can't be either perfectly flat and infinite, nor finite by being a closed hypersphere, but must in fact be made finite by being faintly hyperbolic and open in its curvature.

So contemporary physics knows from observation - unless dark energy can be explained away as observational artefact - that the finitude is looking secondary to an infinitude. Something is faintly accelerating the Universe so that it is generally flexed hyperbolically - it bends away from flat infinity in the other direction. And that is what is actually necessary to fix a future date on when the material contents of an expanding/cooling surface will come to a halt at a fixed temperature.

So finitude is the long-term fate. But for reasons still left open until we can account for the "force" creating the faintly open hyperbolic curvature.

This all has relevance to MWI multiverse hype. The big problem - if you believe in the reality of principles like the conservation of energy, or causal closure, at all - is that MWI violates energy conservation in the most fundamental fashion. That is at the guts of an instinctive objection.

Now if you are not used to taking the materiality of the Universe seriously, then perhaps it is easy just to imagine the free creation of endless worlds, or endless world branches.

But contemporary physics is pretty concerned with an entropic view of reality. Even quantum theory has been "fixed" by welding on statistical mechanics to give us the new and improved decoherence formalism.

The irony is that MWIers latched onto that to peddle their "free lunch" multiverse. But fads come and go. Decoherence is a way to put a thermally coherent limit on a spacetime volume. It brings in the conserving machinery of event horizons.

MWIers still use sleight of tongue to claim infinite branching within the one collective "space". The cost of producing an unlimited number of observers with an unlimited number of points of view is not yet counted by even the expanded quantum formalism, so they can take refuge in that fact.

The maths still only puts numbers on the observables. There is no conservation rule limiting the multiplicity of individual observer. I can be split across as many alternative worlds as you think might be required at "no cost". And so a certain brand of metaphysical nonsense can be promoted as "quantum mechanics with nothing added".

Anyway, the general point is that we do tend to produce simple mathematical frameworks that are open, unbounded and therefore point towards infinity. Then physics comes along and starts to discover the constraints that in fact bound reality and give if some concrete, rather classical-looking, finitude.

The tension between the maths and the physics boils down to issue of how to handle materiality now. Maths is traditionally a view that is spatial. It simplifies by getting rid of time and change and energy within its conceptual metaphysics. But now time and change and energy need to be re-introduced to the mathematical modelling at a fundamental sort of level. They have to indeed emerge from mathematical considerations, not just get tacked on.

Hence string theory, loop quantum gravity, thermal time, anti-de sitter spaces, decoherent QM, holography and other important research projects in contemporary physics.

Multiverse speculation is just the modern equivalent of time travel or "consciousness" based interpretations of QM. A populist sideshow. Metaphysics-lite for the entertainment of the masses.

Conversely, two different beings can be the same at different points in time. For example, a man and his clone are two different beings that are identical. We wouldn't say that they are one and the same person simply because they are identical. — Magnus Anderson

So we can say that the same thing can exist at two different moments in time, but not that the same thing can be in two different locations at once.

That is, where change is the rule - as in time - you find instead the counterfactual of persistence. And where continuity is the rule - as in spatial locations - you find instead the counterfactual of the discontinuous.

Hmm. See where your own arguments are leading you yet? Hint: metaphysics is always about the dialectics of limits. :)

If the fact of generalization itself constituted a knock-down argument that it, and hence the mind that generalizes, must be "immaterial" (even assuming that we knew what that even meant) then everyone who thought about it would be convinced by it and no one would be able to deny it. — Janus

Yep. This is the interesting point. But then that is why Wayfarer would at least be right about the relevance of the information theoretic turn in fundamental scientific ontology. An appropriate form of immateriality is being introduced in the notion of information.

Science used to deal in the "laws of nature". Reality was some mass of atomic particulars. And yet for some reason, that material state of affairs was regulated by universal laws. It was all rather spooky.

But now science is shifting to a more clearly constraints-based view of reality. Laws are emergent from states of information. We have new principles like holography and entropy driving the show. The regulation of nature is now something that arises immanently rather than being imposed transcendently. Newton required a law-giving God to explain the fact of their being universal physical rules. Now we can see how nature's law's might just develop, emerge, evolve.

So this is a big metaphysical shift. But what is really going on?

As I said, information represents the immaterial aspect of reality that always seems philosophically necessary. Matter alone can't cut it. We've known that since Plato hammered it home.

But then neither are mind, or divine, much good as the other half of reality - the bit that does the constraining, or the forming and purposing. The mind is patently complex, not fundamentally simple. It claims to be free and open, not constrained and closed. It is all about a particular lived point of view and not universalised "view from nowhere".

So our concept of mind as the immaterial half of the ontic equation just offers all the wrong properties. The divine is just the mind taken to another level - minding that is even more potentially capricious, unrestrained, the author of material and efficient causes as well as formal and final cause. Talk of God just collapses all the useful distinctions we were trying to build up and so winds up explaining nothing.

Science - as the only place real metaphysics continues to get done - accepted that the maths of form does represent the immaterial part of the reality equation. This was the revolution wrought by Galileo, Keppler, and especially Newton.

It started out as a mechanical notion of form - the computation of the mechanics of moving bodies and rippling waves. Then moved on to become focused on the maths of symmetries and symmetry-breakings. Also probability theory and statistical mechanics became central as descriptions of emergent patterns and the self-organisation of constraints. And of course, conceptions of space and time were expanded to include geometries that were non-Euclidian, conceptions of mechanics were expanded to include behaviours that were non-linear or feedback.

So science was on a journey. It recognised that its metaphysics needed an immaterial aspect to balance the material one. It started out with mathematical forms that were transcendent - Newton style laws, Newton style dimensions - and has steadily worked towards a picture of reality where the maths is describing immanent self-organisation. The laws and dimensionality simply started to appear as regularities - self-organising attractors that governed dynamics quite directly.

It became possible to see how matter could form rules to shape its own behaviour - even perhaps form the forms that actually produced "matter" in the first place. Particles became individuated events, localised excitations, persistent resonances.

Then along comes information theory as the latest improvement on this trip from transcendent cause to immanent self-organisation. Reality still needs its immaterial aspect to explain its material aspect. But now science has a new maths that is suitable for describing and measuring reality in terms of actual "atoms of form".

The materiality of the world is reduced to pretty much a nothing - just the vague hint of an action with a direction, a bare degree of freedom. And at that point where reality approaches its limit of dematerialised nothingness, it can become semiotically united with an immaterial notion of mathematical form coming the other way. The maths proving itself useful for describing reality was becoming steadily less immaterial and transcendent, or "spooky action at a distance". It was becoming steadily more material and immanent in that it talked about symmetry breakings and statistically probable approaches to limits.

Now with information theory, you have the exact point (hopefully) where each of these realms - the dematerialising materiality and the steadily materialising formality - finally converge and become one. They translate. Pan-semiosis is achieved as the material description and the immaterial description are two ways of saying the same thing. The measure of one is the same unit for measuring the other. We can go back and forth across an epistemic cut that formally relates the two realms or aspects of being.

This is a tremendous and historical achievement in metaphysics. It is stupendous that it is happening right now in our own lifetimes.

Science of course is still going off in all directions in the scramble to finalise the details of a final theory of reality. But at the level of metaphysics, we can sit back and be entertained by the spectacular outlines of an understanding that is now coming in to dock.

Sameness isn't something that can only be approached. It is something that is regularly attained. — Magnus Anderson

Heh, heh. Almost surely!

Do you have any literature for this claim? — JupiterJess

Thanks. One slightly mad yet really excellent collection of phenomenological descriptions of dreaming is Andreas Mavromatis's Hypnagogia.

But try it yourself. Next time you catch a dream, ask yourself if anything about each "frame" was in fact moving.

There is always a sense of moving, panning or zooming. But it is like the kind of giddy feeling we get when getting off a roundabout and the world still swirls as an after-effect.

If I'm not mistaken, human nature according to the Eastern social construct doesn't contain a "beast within." Rather, the true nature of sentient beings is that of emptiness, according to Eastern philosophy, and it is social constructs like the concept of self that obscure this nature. — praxis

Yeah, you're right that the beast within is the Western view. If we are talking Buddhism in particular, that agrees with social constructionism in that it teaches that the self is an over-concrete illusion we hang on to.

So that part of the psychology I agree with. But where I disagree is then treating the social ground of this selfhood as also an illusion to be dissolved away.

My argument is that society and self form a complementary interaction. Each is busy producing the other. And together they make something more complexly developed.

It is natural and right that human existence is a balance of competitive and co-operative actions. There is nothing wrong about becoming individuated as a striving self, so long as there is then also the balance of the socially co-operative self. Whereas the Buddhist ambition would seem to be to dissolve both aspects of being human back into detached nothingness.

So for me, sentience is the delicate and complex balance - mastery over instability. Whereas the Buddhist view is that things that arise and become complexly individuated should return back to the undivided vagueness from whence they came.

Transcendence, which may or may not be achieved via a religious practice, isn't about transcending biology. It's about transcending the conceptual construct of self. — praxis

Well the question would seem to be what functional role does some set of cultural beliefs play in the flourishing of that society?

The Western model of mind has evolved to produce people with a striving and competitive mindset. To be individuated is the highest state of development.

But Eastern cultures were appropriate for their time and place. A stoic collectivism gives a different social dynamic. It puts the emphasis on the compassion and co-operation.

Either way, what matters is putting human biology in its place and allowing a rationalising culture to be in control of things. Culture comes to encode the behaviour that works. And culture produces a model of the ideal self as the way to shape up those habits in an individual. We learn to be self-regulating according to a general social script.

Defined in this way, you would be right to say that 100% similar = the same. — Magnus Anderson

Great. Glad you agree.

Still, it makes no sense to say that "the same" is the idealized limit to "the similar". The concept of limit, as defined in mathematical analysis, refers to a value that is approached but never reached. Sameness isn't something that is only approached. — Magnus Anderson

I dunno. Why not check out actual set theory concepts like measure theory, almost surely and negligible sets. You might find out that this is in fact exactly how it works.

Does a 100% similar = the same? And if not, how not?

We are talking about a similarity with a lack of any actual difference. So don't just keep asserting that there remains some difference. You can't wriggle out of it that way.

What about Plato's charioteer? Freud's romantic tripartite division of the soul has ancient roots.

No, A dichotomy is a separation between two things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Bollocks. In metaphysics, the logic of a dichotomy is used to define the complementary limits of any thing-ness or Being.

Anyway, it's likely the word can be used in different ways, but this is all irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is completely relevant to the matter in hand.

As I said, what is relevant is that "same" expresses an exclusion of difference while "similar" expresses necessarily, difference. They are categorically different and cannot be "complementary limits" of the same thing, that would be contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Keep twisting but you won't wriggle off the hook.

Is "100% similar" saying exactly the same as "the same" or not? Likewise is 0% similar saying just the same as "absolutely different" or not?

You know that they do mean the same yet continue to obfuscate.

It is impossible that similarity lacks difference, by way of contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well now you are just arguing my point about "the same" being an ideal limit. It doesn't exist. It is just the asymptotic limit on the complementary idea of "the different".

Simply put, if I know something as contradictory I will not accept it. — Metaphysician Undercover

So in your extensive readings of Aristotle, you simply ignored his notion of contrariety?

This understanding is explicit in Indian traditions as they have a long history of renunciation. Those who dwell 'in the forest' are understood to be outside social structures; this is what 'the forest' represents in that cultural context. — Wayfarer

Yep. But I question the view by which being apart from society is in any way an improvement on the human condition.

If your culture is somehow bad or toxic, then you might want to escape its constraints. But you would still need some new culture within which to flourish.

This is why, for instance, there are teachings in Buddhist meditation on 'bare awareness', through which the student is trained to simply notice the habitual reactions and thought-formations that arise more or less automatically in the mind. That act of noticing is 'seeing how things truly are', which is the basic practice of liberating insight, insofar as to directly how reactive emotions occur is to lessen their hold. — Wayfarer

Again, I don't see this as a stepping up to anything, more a regression ... unless it is the unlearning of habits that allows for the learning of some new and more pro-social set of habits.

So as a social practice, I can see it may have merits. But as a theory of mind, it is quite wrong.

But the point I want to make is that we're not socially conditioned all the way down; we're the artefacts of something more than simply human culture. — Wayfarer

Alternatively, human nature is fundamentally a social construct and so humanity is quite concerned with "taming the beast within". It wants to put a distance between its cultural self and its biological roots.

So philosophy - east or west - makes sense in this context. It is the next step in breeding a detachment from "the beast within". It makes us more social in being more rational and less emotionally driven.

Letting go of "yourself" and "the world" is only a cultural injunction to transcend whatever biology that society wishes didn't dominate your thinking so much. And once you have been trained to let go like that, you can start to fully participate in a calm, rational, linguistic culture where all actions become pro-socially reasonable.

So it is just another cultural game - and one actually designed to strengthen culture's hold on your thought patterns.

So, I've talked about consciousness and awareness. Is introspection something different? — T Clark

Well, I would describe it as the difference between biological consciousness and culturally produced self-consciousness.

So animals are certainly aware of the world in a direct or "extrospective" fashion. They are wordlessly plugged into the here and now in terms of how they are feeling, thinking and reacting.

Then humans have a speech-structured mind. Language is a machinery that allows us to step back and comment on the further fact that we are "selves" doing all these things. Language creates a distance from just the doing and so makes the doing reportable, controllable, memorable, interpretable.

The real mystery of consciousness is the biological one - why brain activity would feel like something. Then self-consciousness is just a linguistic trick. Language allows us to develop the habit of turning our attention inwards on the flow of action, seeing it all as something happening to a self. Then responding to that meta-view in terms of thoughts, feelings and actions.

Isn't the essence of self-awareness an ability to see things we have not been taught to see? Maybe I don't mean "self-awareness." Maybe I mean "enlightenment." Otherwise, how do we get beyond our personal and cultural illusions? — T Clark

Talk about enlightenment or higher states or whatever would be more cultural framing. Every religion - as a cultural practice - has to invent a suitable view of what it might mean to have a certain kind of mind. And then that is what we would learn in that culture. It would become the social script to which we would try to live up to.

So if you are Catholic, you will look inside and see your beastly self in conflict with your purer spirit. You will be trying hard to feel guilt at the right things. You will be looking for evidence of sinful desires. Your introspecting may become very focused on a particular social role it has to play.

And just the same if you are brought up in a completely different culture - like say Buddhism - where a different model of your internal workings will become the lens through which you see yourself.

And yet again if you are a modern neoliberal aetheist, or a wet PoMO liberal.

All cultures promote some model of how your mind ought to be inside. You learn those concepts and apply them in a way to gain some proper control over this introspecting "self".

I'm standing in a dark room. In front of me, maybe on a stage, is a cloud that fills the whole front of the room. — T Clark

Yeah, that does sound interestingly different from me. There is the same sense of a peripheral feel. But I guess I conceptualise it more in terms of the neuroscientific models I know. So I am quite aware of switching between a focused goal-pursuing left brain attentional state and an open vigilant right brain one. There is a different feeling when you are still searching for the connecting elements versus when you are working through the details of a path that you already expect to fit together.

So maybe you are talking about the same general thing, but conceptualising it in metaphors, like a room with a glowing cloud before you. My conceptualising doesn't have that habit of imagery, but I do conceptualise it in terms of a familiar brain process.

She told me she had just realized she is one of those people who have no mind's eye. It is very difficult for her to see images of even things and people she knows very well. — T Clark

Yep. It seems like a Bell curve distribution. So 10% of people are highly visual, 10% are surprisingly lacking in such imagery.

Two points. The difference is easy to explain as it relates to how far down the visual hierarchy you can push an idea so that it becomes fleshed out in concrete detail. The high level impression of a giraffe would be highly abstract - hazy. But if we focus for half a second, we can generate some particular giraffe experience that is "painted" across the primary visual cortex. Although people vary in how easy they can do that.

Then also, the visual pathways are strongly divided into separate object recognition and spatial relations pathways. So you can be highly visual in terms of one and not the other. One path would generate the concrete pictures of actual scenes. The other would generate a "concrete" sense of some set of objectless spatial relations or transformations. So if you are good as an engineer, its important to flip shapes around in your mind and really feel how the spaces fit together, or put different forces on each other.

Well, it is odd. Actually, it's terrible, horrifying. Of course there were feelings, I was just not aware of them. Did you ever go to the bathroom in a public toilet and have trouble peeing because others were around? Imagine if you felt that same panic every time you were with other people and might have to provide an appropriate emotional response. — T Clark

So it sounds like you just didn't have the "right" training in how to conceptualise that part of your experience.

If you are good at compartmentalising your thoughts - another attentional skill - then it is easy to make that kind of disconnect a habit.

One of the things you have to teach young kids is to recognise their emotions. They are quite confused until they have learnt some concepts that explain their rapidly changing shifts in state. After that, they can start to regulate and feel in more socially accepted ways.

If they see someone get hurt, what should the feel? Physiologically they may feel a natural aversion, an anxiety, an urge to move away or even laugh. We want to teach them instead to feel a suitable empathy. Their fluttering nerves and shock can be reframed as being natural to wanting to help rather than being natural to wanting to flee.

Arousal is just arousal. Then we learn to frame it in a socially correct fashion.

I come back to what I asked before - isn't it possible, even if only for Buddha, to go beyond that cultural conceptual structure. — T Clark

Well my answer is only going to be that Buddhism is just another form of social mind-control. It is a model of how to be a self that is promoted within a certain culture as it is pro-social for that culture. It serves that society's organisational interests.

But then I'm also arguing that we are only ever creatures of our cultures. So it is not a bad thing in itself that we are culturally programmed to have a particular view of our "selves".

And some cultures of "self" may be better than others in long-run evolutionary terms.

So there is no going beyond some kind of conceptual structure. There isn't any truth to be found in being a human that isn't somehow a reflection of a culture.

Yet we certainly these days can make some choices about the cultural framings we allow ourselves to be most influenced by.

One excludes difference while the other includes difference, so the two are logically dichotomous. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you are presuming that dichotomies are dualities and not in fact dichotomies? I see where you are going wrong.

Dichotomies describe complementary limits on being. Thus they talk about the being that lies in-between two opposing limits of the possible.

You are then treating the limits on the possible as the actuality which has the being. Rookie error.

I really do not know what you mean by "100% similar". Similar implies that there is difference, and same dictates that there is no difference. Therefore whatever you mean by 100% similar, it cannot mean "the same", without contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. That is a question you will really want to avoid having to answer.

You are trying to squirrel out of it by saying similar implies the existence of some difference. Well of course. There's your dichotomy. The similar is that which is the most lacking in any difference. It is formally reciprocal or inverse to difference in being as far from that "othering" limit to itself. It is the least difference you can have - which means accepting difference as the something that sameness is different too.

So back to the 100% similar. Why are you so reluctant to admit that this is no different than any claim about "the same". A complete lack of difference could only be a complete presence of the same.

But you must avoid admitting this otherwise your sophic house of cards collapses.

You are obfuscating the meaning of "the same" appealing to "similar" as if it were "the same", in order to put forth an unsound argument as if it were sound. That's why I accused you of sophistry. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where is the difficulty in recognising that "the same" is the idealised limit to "the similar"? Why are you obfuscating the matter with your unsound sophistry?

If things are 100% similar, are they the same? And if things are 99% similar, are they nearly the same?

You seem to be striving after a distinction in language that isn't properly there.

For the purpose of this discussion, by consciousness I mean the capacity for putting experiences into words. Awareness, on the other hand, is pre-verbal. — T Clark

Interesting OP. Speaking from psychological science, what you are noting - in my view - is that the ability to introspect on "the contents of the mind" is a learnt and linguistically-structured skill.

So first up, introspection is not some hardwired biological brain capacity - intrinsic to "being conscious". It is very much a learnt skill that we pick up as part of our cultural upbringing and made possible because self-directed speech does allow us to focus our attention and create a narrative story of "what is going on inside".

So it is therefore quite easy to miss stuff in our own heads if we haven't formed the right conceptual structure to notice it. We can be like infants who still find the world a buzzing confusion, or remote tribesmen transported to a big city, who don't quite yet have the eyes to make sense of what they see (any more than a big city person would be able to make proper coherent sense of a tropical forest if dropped straight into it).

We have to learn what to expect when we introspect to actually even begin to "see it". This could easily be something we haven't learnt to do even as teenagers. And then our ideas about what we should find inside are so culturally dependent that we are only going to see what our cultures kind of teach us to see.

Take how dreams were widely thought to happen only in black and white back in the 1950s. Seems ridiculous that this was an academic belief.

Yet I thought that dreams were only visual, so was surprised that once I started asking the question and paying attention, I found there were smells and tastes as well.

Likewise, I believe that there was of course motion in dream images. Yet on closer examination, I realised that there is only a swirling sense of flow or zoom. The image itself was a static single frame with a sense of motion added.

That made scientific sense when I thought about it. Motion and shape are processed separately in the visual cortex. But maybe without this other kind of cultural explanation, I might not have believed the evidence of my own eyes. I might have still reported actual moving imagery as my introspective state.

Generally, my introspective understanding of my own thinking and experiencing processes utterly changed after a few years of studying the neurology of the phenomenology. Once I had learnt the correct constructs, I could know what to expect to see and so actually start to see it accurately. It became a habit to not just think thoughts, but to be also able to catch how a pattern of thought came together.

I can see the universe – everything, stars and electrons, love, god, macaroni and cheese, my brothers - as a cloud. When I am putting ideas together to describe what I know or make an argument, I am very aware that I am putting together a story and I see a curve, a narrative arc, that shows the sequence of facts, ideas, and conclusions I am using to make my case. — T Clark

I was puzzled by this. When you say you see a cloud, do you mean visually see a jostle of images or do you mean something more kinesthetic and visuospatial, like having a sense of all these things "more or less within reach"? So they swim as possibilities on the periphery and can be brought sharply into view as required.

You might indeed be much more concretely visual than me. People do vary.

When I was a teenager, I was almost completely unaware of what I felt emotionally. Worse, it didn’t seem like I felt anything. I felt inauthentic in a fundamental way. Numb. Frozen. — T Clark

Again, this sounds odd the way you describe it. It is hard to imagine not feeling things, even if the feelings are confused, inchoate, hard to pin down.

But neuroscience says it is quite possible as reportable emotion does depend on the strength of linkages between the frontal cortex and the limbic emotion centres. There could be biological reasons for a lack of access.

On the other hand, again there is a learning issue. Positive psychology does try to train people to notice the fine-grain detail of what they feel. It is a skill to be learnt, and one that thus involves the learning of a conceptual framing. People might not realise when they feel anxious or tense. Once they start looking, they can see how their body is responding and separate their feelings in that fashion.

So the general message is that all introspection is a learnt art. We have to have the concepts which tell us what to expect before it becomes easy and habitual to see our own internal world in a stably constructed way.

The flip side of that is that we mostly only get to learn the framing of our interior world that comes from our cultural backdrop. Our families and childhood relations can be as distorting as enlightening. Society teaches us the habits that best suit it.

We can broaden our view of what should be going on through art and literature. Books and films paint a picture of what "being a person" ought to be like. But even this is going to be more cultural than accurate.

Then we can start to introspect through the eyes of scientific knowledge. This should be the truest picture. However even psychological science is heavily socially influenced. It perpetuates many of the traditional cultural stereotypes itself. Phenomenology is rather fringe to its concerns. So there are only a few talented folk - like Oliver Sacks - who really get into it.

Another problem for psychological science is that we are all in fact neurologically varied. So there isn't in fact a one size fits all account.

For instance, both my daughters have synesthesia to different degrees. Words and numbers provoke sensations of colour. Neither properly realised it until we happened to be talking about it one evening when they were teenagers.

It is the kind of neuro distinction that society has no use for and so there is no cultural tip-off that warns people it might be a possibility. Whereas kids get tested for colour blindness.

Another interesting one is dyscalculia - a basic problem imagining the kind of visuospatial relations needed to be good with handling numbers or telling the time.

Society took a while to diagnose dyslexia as a widespread "problem". It came to the fore as a literate workforce became a universal educational need. Dyscalculia only started to get the same recognition in the 1990s. Until then, it was OK to just be a lazy maths hater. It was natural and socially quite normal to be bad at sums.

So society really does shape what we believe about what we should find "inside". It is the prime source of any conceptual structure. And it approaches introspection in its own often quite self-interested way.

No. I said the opposite. I said that sets A = {1, 2, 3} and B = {4, 5, 6} do not have "belongs to some other set" in common. Rather, it is your sets, let us call them sets X = {1, 2, 3, belongs to some other set} and Y = {1, 2, 3, belongs to some other set}, that have this element in common — Magnus Anderson

Hilarious. If you are going to invoke set theory formalism, then you have to stick to its rules, not just make up any old shit.

Your claim is that if we are not aware of some portion of reality that whatever portion of reality we are aware of is not reality itself. That's nonsense. — Magnus Anderson

If that was anything like what I said, I agree it would be nonsense.

You are trying to oversimplify this process by reducing it to "it's all about what works". — Magnus Anderson

So you describe the naive realist position and then accuse me of oversimplifying.

Sounds legit. :)

The Level III Multiverse (Tegmark) gets a lot of stick, despite the fact that it adds zero complexity to our conception of Reality according to known physics. — tom

It seems a stretch to say the many worlds interpretation doesn't add an unnecessary amount of complication to our metaphysics.

I still prefer to hope for a physics that fixes the MWI's unbounded world-line branching by incorporating the actuality of a generalised wavefunction collapse.

But with decoherence maths - QM+statistical mechanics - we get a workable collapse anyway. So there's no burning need to embrace the extravagant ontology of MWI. Decoherence delivers a quasi-collapse that makes the theory fit with the world we observe quite adequately while a "proper" theory is still under development.

So while you claim that MWI adds zero complexity to the maths, you have to admit that the same equations produce too many answers. It is only natural to expect the maths therefore misses some constraint on its unbound fecundity. And now just such a thermodynamic limit has been tacked on with decoherence.

So MWI has become more realistic, more in accord with the world as we know it classically. Yet the very fact that QM+limits is an improvement should be evidence that multiverse thinking was always wrong-headed.

MWI has already begun the job of denying itself, even though many people think it is the "decoherence interpretation". We need something extra by way of a world-constraining mechanism so as to actually reduce the complexity of the QM maths.

What exactly is self-organizing? — Harry Hindu

Dissipative structure. So mountains, tornadoes and tomatoes are all natural in that they are expressions of the structure that arises to dissipate entropy gradients. That is what nature has in common. It rearranges itself into the forms that best serve entropy production.

Human beings and other organisms don't self-organize. If they did, then they could exist in any environment, but they don't. — Harry Hindu

Nature is a hierarchy of entropy production. So life and mind are just the complex expression of a general principle. The environment is already entropifying with a physical simplicity. Life and mind can then build on that. That is why we would regard ourselves as part of nature. Our existence serves the second law of thermodynamics.

What about the stars, rocks, water, air? Do any of those things self-organize? Are they not natural? What about fire? — Harry Hindu

Exactly. They are dissipative structures. So they are natural. As processes, they are all expressions of the one common imperative. Entropification is the essence of what it is to be natural.

I really can't see your distinction between cars that rust and cars that don't be natural vs. artificial. Plastic may not have been around prior to humans but neither was iron around prior to stars creating it in their centers and exploding spilling out their contents to the universe. — Harry Hindu

Iron was produced by super-novas as an entropic outcome. Oxidation of iron is an energetically-favoured dissipative process. So all natural.

But humans building cars are trying to halt entropification as much as practical. We want our machines to last - to not be subject to self-organised erosion.

Plastic is an artificial material. Well, so is sheet iron protected by enamel. But plastic is more artificial in this context as it is more enduring, less prone to natural decay processes. It holds whatever form its human designers had in mind rather better.

Again, I think that the word, "artificial" is antiquated as it stems from our old knowledge that we are specially made and separate from nature. — Harry Hindu

As Wayfarer says, just check the dictionary. It means something humans make as opposed to something humans might find. It is a form that is mechanically constructed rather than a form that organically grows.

The old religions were animistic - everything, even the trees and the wind - were alive and mindful. If it moved or made a noise, it had an inner spirit. So there was no real separation from nature at all.

Then the theistic religions arose. Man became separate from nature. But now because man was touched by the divine. He had a soul. Or whatever.

I agree true AI would look to blur the lines. But consider that we would still be likely talking of hardware that is manufactured rather than grown. It wouldn’t be self organising development like the growth of a body. It would be some kind of factory assembly.

So we are talking about a mentality that might be natural in being self organised via a purposeful interaction with a world, yet running on a machinery that is not natural.

An interesting hybrid situation. Yet I’m not advocating for a hard line between what is natural and what is artificial. Although also, I doubt that true AI is going to be achieved in a hurry.