Just like you say, it's all a great big quantum hologram. Far out, man.

Now to remind you again, the OP is about the specific question of the transition from chemistry to biology. Biology says the answer is just add semiotics to dissipative structure. And over the past decade - with rapid advances in our ability to do experiments at the nanoscale of molecular biology - what this means has become pretty precise as a hypothesis.

Now what were you saying about projected mind fields again? It's oh so fascinating. Everyone will try not to laugh.

There is not one shred of evidence supporting the It Just Happened Theory of Everything. — Rich

But it didn't just happen. And there are now many "shreds of evidence" that constrain speculation about how it did happen.

As you say, religion is religion. And new age babble is new age babble even when it is furiously incanting "holographic quantum interference projected mind field hologram".

When faith pretends to be science, then there is a problem. — Rich

Again, you are showing your basic confusion about the epistemology of science. Like any exercise in rationality, it starts by treating any grounding supposition as ... a supposition.

I realise this may be an unfamiliar concept to you.

But the materialists are acting on concrete models here. The field of abiogenesis has moved on from your "chemical soup" parody by 65 years.

So you may claim to be "good with" your holographic-this and your quantum-that - your usual new age babble - however that counts for nothing. It is not an argument, merely a profession of faith.

So the Theory of Spontaneous Everything is a matter of faith and science just wants everyone to buy into it hoping that big words will cover up the religious overtones. — Rich

No. If science were arguing for "spontaneous everything", it would be offering a concrete model. You would have something you could actually critique (although you would also have to read up on it).

But I realise you just love making a noise about holographic this and quantum that. It sounds kind of science-y and deep, doesn't it? :-}

Now, do you have faith or do you actually have some evidence for Spontaneous Everything? — Rich

You seem to be lost as usual. The question was about the transition from non-living to living. So how to get from chemistry to biology.

If you have some specific criticism of current abiogenetic thinking about that, now would be the time to air it. So far you are only parading your ignorance on what is actually being suggested.

Everyone needs to really ruminate over the scientific Genesis story. I mean really digest it fully. There is no tale ever told that is more fantastic. — Rich

Yeah. But you don't appear to have a clue about what science claims.

Chemistry might well regard "a soup" to be in a lifeless and mindless state, as that would be talking about some chemical mixture at equilibrium. But chemistry can also model the emergent or self-organising behaviour of systems that are not at equilibrium. Or even better, are active dissipative structures.

So your basic ignorance of the facts of science are just going to keep tripping you up in these discussions.

I believe it is helpful to fully digest the Scientific Genesis story: A soup of chemicals came together and spontaneously created all life that we see, feel, and acts. Everything. — Rich

For a laugh, can you find a recent paper from the field of abiogenesis which makes such an out-dated claim?

I mean it has been 65 years since Miller and Urey produced some amino acids by zapping a flask of methane, ammonia and other basic compounds with "primordial lightning".

So is 1952 really when you last checked out the literature? :-d

Anyways, long story short, one can still be in the relatively normal range of moods (probably a slight bit more towards acute depression though), and still work within a wordview that keeps in mind the Pessimistic trademarks of relentless desire, the burdens of life, and an understanding of the absurd. — schopenhauer1

Alternatively, the fact that there is a "relatively normal range of moods" fatally undermines structural pessimism as it shows that what is natural is always some organised balance.

Pessimism has to find its force by going to some extreme and claiming "that's how it really is". And yet in nature, the balancing of complementary extremes is what we observe to be the metaphysical norm.

For example, "If looked upon in a transcendental way, like one moving farther and farther from Earth, it is absurd the repetitious nature of each day, and our desires butting against the cultural structures of our environs."

So yes, if we distort our metaphysical point of view to look at our existence in this extreme fashion - the viewpoint from deepest, timeless, space - then our daily routine will seem maximally meaningless. Likewise if we zoom into the molecular scale.

But really, we personally live in terms of time over scales of days to decades to lifetimes, and maybe an active concern for the lives or our kids and grandkids. Or in spatial scale, our homes and gardens, communities, nations, etc.

So our existence ranges over a fair scale in terms of its lived meaningfulness. It spans a few orders of magnitude. But not the 30 or 40 orders of magnitude your pessimistic extremism is forced to assert.

That is not to say that we live in some ideal world at the moment. Our current way of life may be structurally unbalanced - distorted because it has flattened temporality and expanded spatiality. That is, the world system is rushing change and living short-sightedly, while at the same time undermining family, neighourhood and community in favour of disconnected globality.

But again, that make pessimism an impoverished philosophy because it is unable to diagnose what is natural - the eternal balancing act. It takes an extreme view that tries to stand outside of actual lived existence and that is indeed absurd.

science does not know the cause of life. — Wayfarer

But in 100 years, it has narrowed down the options vastly. Which can't be said of any other approach to "knowing".

Perhaps you ought to read some up to date account, like Nick Lane's books, before making such pronouncements.

If you don't find his team's theory of abiogenesis convincing, you are of course free to tell us why.

Each point in space will probably only be able to reflect light in one direction, or at least in a limited number of directions. — Hachem

Now you are on to the quantum mysteries of how light acts as both a particle and a wave.

The photon emitted by a radiating atom goes in every direction as a potential event. It radiates as a spherical wavefront travelling outwards at c. But then an observation - some actual interaction which absorbs that potential - collapse things so it looks like the photon was a particle travelling in a straight line to its eventual target.

So once you get into the quantum level understanding of optics, you really do have to give up what seem to be your commonsense intuitions about light as a ray travelling from this place to that, crossing over, or bending, or whatever.

The idea of a wave and the idea of a particle are the two ways we need to think about it to fully describe the physical mechanics of optics. They are the two complementary viewpoints that encompass the whole of what is going on.

But just as obviously, they are two exactly opposite notions of nature. And that is where the metaphysical problems start .... if you think our models of nature are meant to represent nature in some naively intuitive fashion.

The question now is, how come light rays travel in straight horizontal lines when dealing with mirrors, but suddenly start crossing each other when going though a pinhole or a lens? — Hachem

The behaviour of the light doesn't change. It is scattered in every direction off illuminated objects. But the arrangement of pinholes and image forming planes that reflect that light then samples that light from some particular point of view.

The light does not in fact have to travel in "a straight line", just the "shortest/quickest path". So that is where refraction or bending of the path comes in when you have a lens made of glass.

As to the image inversion issue, when you look into a mirror, you can only see one direction reversed or inverted. You are pointed at the mirror and so your reflection is pointed back at you. But when we are talking about a pinhole casting an image, then we are standing back at yet another point of view where we can see the inversion of direction in the other two planes.

It is like seeing the inversion that would result from the mirror being beneath our feet or off to our side, rather than front on.

In the case of a camera or our eye, we would have to accept the idea that the image is somewhere on or in the lens, and that light from the outside shines through it and projects it on our retina or the sensor area. But how did the image get in the lens if not carried by the light rays?
— Hachem

It might help to think about how a mirror works as well. So what you are talking about with a system of lenses is a way to reflect the light from some distant scene onto a flat surface. That creates "the image". The image is not carried in the reflected light as such. You have to do the extra thing of cutting across that light with a plane that then makes a particular image.

With a mirror, there is no lens getting in the way. And depending on where you stand looking at the image in a mirror, you will see a different view.

The lens then does the extra thing of fixing a point of view. The aperture can be made pin-hole sized so the reflection is an image from just one place - mimicking the way we ourselves impose just one point of view on what we see. We have to stand somewhere even to look at a mirror, which is why we see only one of the vast number of possible images we might see in its reflecting plane.

The lens itself does the other thing of making a very large world of illuminated objects tractably small. This is why it is useful to make the light "cross over" at the pinhole of the aperture. You can then place your retina at a comfortable distance to make the image. The aperture shrinks the "mirror" to a pinhole size, then the "reflection" you are looking at begins to expand again to the other side. It is an extra bit of mechanism to reduce the world to a size that an eye could process without having to be as big as the world it sees.

Hey, when you put it like that, you have an argument that works.

SSRI's are a famous Big Pharma example of selling the public on the notion that depression is due to a lack of a particular molecule.

Scientists working on evolutionary theory could only wish they might get a sniff of some of that Big Pharma dosh.

It's like all a conspiracy? Whoah.

Yep, society is like biology in that it diversifies as it feeds off an entropic gradient.

These pesky ESS evolutionary scientists you complain about turn out to be explaining exactly what you are complaining about. Fancy that.

As a social theory, that applies to all human activity. Churches and all the other theatres of ideas.

The difference of course for science is that it also has the self-regulating mechanisms for calling time on unproductive bullshit. As a model of the world, it has to meet certain objective criteria. It ain't just entertainment.

his kind of stuff gives me a headache, but for those so inclined here is one perspective of the current state of the evolution of evolutionary theory: — Rich

So the article can be summed up as saying everyone working on evolutionary theory agrees the glass has water sitting to the halfway mark, but then "violently disagrees" about whether to call that state of affairs half-full or half-empty.

Business as usual. ;)

(Back 30 years ago, the evo-devo vs modern synthesis issue was rather more controversial - folk might swear the evo-devo glass was empty.)

That life actively strives to throw out new variants and in doing maximises its survival. This is different to Survival of the Fittest where variants are not encouraged by evolution but become useful nonetheless in times of great change. — MikeL

Remember also that Bergson was speculating long before the machinery of DNA was discovered. So after DNA, you have a problem that the ability to replicate or clone a code was just too good.

Selection pressure required that the coding machinery evolve that kind of self-protecting stability just to ward of DNA parasites - snip out the rogue genetic sequences that would insert themselves and get replicated as junk.

So there were a host of adaptations just to make DNA a robust, non mutating, cloning device.

Therefore, of course, there had to be the counter evolutionary pressure to expose DNA to selection pressure. Controlled evolvability also had to evolve. In complex multicellular life, this was achieved for example by a separation of the germ-line. You had sexual reproduction and specialist cells - sperm and eggs - to generate the requisite degree of mutational variety.

Tricks like doubling the chromosomes and having a gene shuffling recombination meant that every individual gene could be tested by the environment individually - not possible to do in bacteria with a simple genome ring that just has to copy the whole gene kitset as one go, risking the loss of as many good genes as bad ones.

Sexual reproduction with doubled chromosomes also means offspring can inherit 0, 1 or 2 doses of any particular gene - copies from both mother and father. So again a way of concentrating the variety in a way that blind natural selection really has some information to dig its teeth into.

So Bergson was right in a handwaving speculative way. Something had to counter natural selection's ability to remove inheritable variety. There had to be a creative element to match the destructive element. It takes two to tango, yin and yang to produce the third thing of an equilibrium balance.

If one is willing to stretch the definition of "consciousness" as being a process of intelligent self making, then organisms do contribute to their evolution by making a choice about how much they need to expose themselves to the vagaries of environmental chance. They play a game of risk and reward which has some optimal balance.

So at the species level, you could say organisms are "conscious" of their world in that they make adaptive shifts over "mental durations" that span many millenia. It is not completely metaphoric because what brains do is also the same kind of "in the moment" adaptive response, fed by creative ideational variety, with the aim of being optimally tuned to learn from the vagaries of life.

But I fear saying that as people then want to go back to strict either/or. Either biology is dead physics or it is alive spirit - as in Bergson's elan vital. My own position is that life and mind are something else - semiotic/dissipative process organised hierarchically over many timescales or durations. (Again, Bergson was essentially right with his cone of memory, but cast that in spiritualist rather than semiotic terms).

Anyway, for a holist or systems metaphysics, it is just expected that any process is formed by its complementary nature. So natural selection would have to be countered by a matching capacity for creative (that is, intelligently tuned) variety production. And since we found out all about DNA, how that smart balancing act is achieved by biological life has become richly understood.

Evolutionary models, when addressed on their own right, hold that all life is equally evolved. — javra

It is as much ideology to proclaim evolutionary equality or multiplicity as it is to assert winners and losers. There is so far only one species that could anthropomorphise an entire planet. We and our domestic animals, our selectively bred crops, dominate the biomass of the Earth. We are more evolved in having broken through to a higher grade of sociocultural evolution.

It might not make us fitter in the long run if we can't find the sustainable balance within that. But biology can see grades of evolution and doesn't have to answer to what are essentially political projections coming from left and right.

Life exists to accelerate entropification. It creates dissipative pathways to cool the universe faster.

Of course it's contribution in cosmological terms is infinitesimal. But green forest does a better job than bare rock at turning hot sun rays into cooler infrared radiation. The energy goes back into space at a much lower spectral temperature that would otherwise have been the case.

As to the Matrix, it's a film. Does simulated rain make you really wet? Would a simulated factory make real robots?

Also you personify Nature i — MikeL

Because I don't have a problem crediting nature with purpose, even if it is not much of a purpose in being the general tendency to entropify.

So ordinary language gives us two choices - either to chose mentalistic or physicalist terminology. Dualism is baked into our linguistic culture. Biology would offer more accurate jargon, but that might go down so well.

What do you mean by "means" in the above statement "it doesn't have the means to make itself"? A robot assembly factory is able to slap together pieces to make another robot. Do you mean resources? — MikeL

Someone would have to have built the factory, supplied it with power, stepped in to fix the software glitch that halted production, etc. And then the factory is building robots, not building factories.

So natural things are autopoietic or self-making. They develop rather than get built.

Could AI also be a generator of ideas or desires? — MikeL

Ask Siri.

Yawn.

So the difference between process and substance is just too complicated for you to follow? You have to keep talking past it?

Let's count the number of traits of the mind that this statement attributes to a soup of chemicals: — Rich

Where was "the mind" said or implied?

I have no problem at all if you understood me as talking about mindfulness as the concrete action of modelling the world in biological fashion.

And where was "a soup of chemicals" said or implied? Clearly I was emphasising the structure not the matter.

So you are just making the newbie error of reifying a process as a thing. You want to criticise me for believing in my fundmental stuff rather than your fundamental stuff. And yet my actual argument is against that kind of naive metaphysics entirely.

It’s easy to then declare myself a panpsychist of sorts, but the truth is that my current gut feelings (which can always be wrong) find a sharp division between inanimate identities and animate ones; logically, I’ve no idea how panspsychism would work. This is what I’m diggin’ in the dirt for. What attribute would an inanimate identity hold that, though not itself being the awareness of life, could be logically presented not as a divide but as a continuum. — javra

Panpsychists do often just say that it is the special structure of nervous systems and brains - whatever that is - that explains why you get the step up.

So there are two explanations - both of which ape what physicalism itself would suggest.

The first is the idea that if you concentrate things in some fashion, you get a spontaneous phase transition. Condense vapour and you get liquid water. The physical situation (which is completely unmysterious) can be offered as a metaphor to suggest a rarified "mental stuff" might do the same, suddenly changing state at a certain threshold to coalesce as a located first-person point of view.

The other then is that the information processing structure of organisms is what does the trick - just as it does for information processing physicalists. So now the panpsychism piggybacks on the informational explanation rather than the dynamical one.

You can see where this is heading....whatever seems the right answer due to the success of physicalist modelling can be held to be the secret sauce of panpsychic mechanism too.

The mental never in fact explains anything. It just sits there demanding its explanation.

OK, so you hold that consciousness is not substance but rather that some vague matter/info/stuff is — javra

I would start by reminding that I would see consciousness as a process and not any kind of "stuff". You do think of consciousness as a stuff - substantial being - and so you automatically try to understand my position in the same ontic terms. For you, the critical question becomes what sort of substance am I talking about - aha! Information. Or (vague) matter. Or something (some thing).

Still, last I recall, we can both agree that life and non-life are qualitatively different. — javra

Again you just translated the discussion into substance terminology. Where I would say we might agree on a difference in process, you say we might agree about a difference in quality - a particular property of a substance.

To my mind, the physical plane is the closest communal proximity that all co-existent agents hold to the grand finale. It deterministically (again, derived teleologically) constrains our various freewill intentions to a set of possibilities that we all abide by (e.g., nature says: thou shalt not act out one’s fantasies of flying off of tall cliffs/buildings through the flapping of hands lest one fall and loose one’s identity to this world … kind of thing). — javra

It is plausible that when all possible wishes are taken into account, a generalised shared world emerges as the baseline to that. That is also the logic of the "sum over histories" approach in quantum mechanics. The Universe can be understood as emerging from an ensemble of possibilities where the vast mass of those possibilities will self-cancel away, leaving behind only the commonalities that are uncancellable.

So if we average all "desires" or "acts" in a world where the possibility of turning right is matched by the possibility of turning left, then the shared outcome is a world where what is left uncancellable is the symmetry of being poised between two options.

The story works for either a mentalistic or physicalist metaphysics.

Thing is, there’s a bridge that I have a hard time traversing. I’m very set on affirming that life and non-life are substantially different, with the difference being that of awareness. What I’m considering, though, is the possibility of there being an underlying factor to both non-life and life—one that would yet be present in the final end—which when held in large enough degrees forms the gestalt of a first-person point of view as can be defined by perception and perceiver (no homunculus). — javra

This indeed seems a critical problem for your approach. You are wanting to assert that awareness is basic, and yet it only emerges eventually.

So one solution to that is panpsychism - saying that awareness was always there, just dilute and not properly organised to be a structured state of experience, a point of view.

The other would be to turn causality on its head and make finality retrospective. In Hegelian fashion, the world is called into being by the desire that is its own end.

Panpsychism is in fact pretty reductionist - back to primal stuff with primal properties. And the idea of retrocausality is something even physics is having to contemplate, as in Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Experiments like the quantum eraser show how the future can act backwards to affect events in the past - or at least something that "causality violating" must be the case.

So for both the mentalistic and physicalist ontologies, the alternatives boil down in similar fashion.

Here, there’s yet a duality, as you might call it, between the ontically real “agency” and the information that, despite its causal influence upon agency, is nevertheless an illusion which vanishes in the final end. Though this is from my interpretation, I believe you’ll find it parallels your own: in the Heat Death you uphold, information as we know it, together with all natural laws as we know them, all causal processes as we know them, etc., vanish, leaving instead … well, that’s your territory. — javra

The way you describe it sounds too much like the Cheshire Cat's grin. Once more, you are reifying the process of acting agentially - behaving like a self in form a point of view - as then this thing of "agency". Your claim becomes that an abstraction is left as all that exists. Knock down Oxford University and its essence still persists, hanging over the cleared ground as a real substantial being.

The Heat Death is a more subtle concept because it is in fact a process that never stops, yet becomes eternally unchanging. Differencing still goes on, but it ceases to make a difference. You are left with the same process producing now only the simplest possible outcome.

[For those who deny that bacteria hold any awareness and some minimal degree of freewill, the transition nevertheless happened somewhere along the way toward being human; I pick at this level for my own reasons … As for myself, I’ll not here again debate where the transition first occurred, nor on whether reality is all determinist v. indeterminist. Again, the intended theme here is how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency.] — javra

This is the advantage of a semiotic approach to physicalism. We can now define the bridge as the epistemic cut between - as Pattee puts it - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics.

So as soon as proper internalised semiosis occurs - as soon as there is a modelling relation - there is life and mind in some formally-defined degree.

For a bacteria, this sign-processing may be terribly simple. The mechanics of what is going on is completely transparent. A bacterium with a flagellum - a wiggling tail - connected to a chemo-receptor, can swim along a gradient of food scent.

So long as the receptor is signalling "yes", the molecular motors spin the tail, a collection of strands, one way. The bacterium is driven in a straight line towards its heart's desire. Then if the receptor's switch is then flipped the other way - no chemicals binding it, causing the receptor's molecular structure to change shape due to a simple alteration in the balance of its mechanical forces - then that in turns signals the flagellum to rotate in the other direction. The bundle of strands untangle and no longer push the bacterium in a direction. It now tumbles about randomly - until it again happens to pick up a scent.

The point is that if we actually look at the ground level of life, there is just no mystery. You get intelligent behaviour due to semiotics. A mechanical chain of events connects information to action as a hardwired interpretive habit.

This epistemic cut is a small trick. But having got established, it can be scaled to be as large as you like. The modelling relation has no limit on its complexity. Physicalism just doesn't have a problem explaining intelligent behaviour. There is no explanatory gap when it comes to semiosis as a model-producing process. The gap arises only once folk start treating the process as something further - an ontological thing, or substantial state.

Again, the intended theme here is how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency. — javra

One can't because the dualism is baked in by the chosen terminology. It becomes a word game, not a reasonable inquiry.

There doesn't seem to be a strict cut-off being what is natural and what is artificial. — darthbarracuda

The simple difference would be that the artificial doesn't have the means to make itself.

Nature makes itself whether that be at the level of rivers carving out their channels or bodies turning food into flesh. The artificial only happens as the result of someone having the idea and the desire to manufacture the material form.

under a Survival of the Fittest model I would be looking for where is the selection pressure to do so was when delicious leaves and grass were already in abundance. The ancestor possums weren't attacking each other so there was no need to seek out new niches to live in. — MikeL

If a leaf eating possum suddenly appears, that creates a selective advantage for trees to have poisonous leaves. Then eucalypts having evolved toxins, that creates a niche for specialist eucalypts eaters like koalas.

For every move, there is a countermove. And eventually things settle into some mutual balance that is tolerable for both.

Adaptation into niches without a primary environmental driver to do so seems like a superfluous action. Do you agree with the idea that a creative evolution model and not survival of the fittest model fits best here? — MikeL

But there is an environmental "driver" if there are resources sitting around needing consuming. So adaptive radiation is no big deal. Life would fill every available crevice even if that search is purely random.

Then Bergson was indeed right about the hole in early evolutionary theory - the fact that selection can only remove variety - but hardly correct about the answer for where that genetic variety might come from.

Of course Bergson was years before the machinery of DNA was discovered. We now know how the genetic deck gets shuffled.

Creative evolution seems a better model. — MikeL

To biologists?

First, I wasn't endorsing Lamarckian evolution.

Then on marsupials, you would get divergent evolution to fill all niches because of a lack of constraint. And convergent evolution due to constraints emerging. There are wolf-like and flying-squirrel like marsupials as ecosystems would be organised with similar niches to fill.

By environment, I meant everything that might impinge as information. So that would include competition and predation from other species.

It's the idea behind punctuated evolution. Whole ecosystems can maintain a collective stable balance for some time. Then there is a collective jump to another balance as the result of some perturbation.

I’ve instead reduced metaphysics to a) a multiplicity of awareness-endowed agents (i.e., first person points of view), b — javra

The infodynamic closest equivalent might be agreeing that every material event or degree of freedom is like an informational point of view.

If something happens, then that fixes a departure point for what may follow. In that sense, material reality is a pattern woven from the establishment of multiple points of view. If an atom decays, the event creates fresh information, an update on the physical context within which all possible points of view are determined.

But this is a metaphorical rather than literal description. The having of a point of view is not about awareness as such (awareness not being a substantial thing). It is just speaking to the particularity of being a dissipative event located at instant of spacetime.

How do you propose that identity is established if not via awareness which, as awareness, identifies itself as same/identical to itself and different/non-identical to other? Now, if there’s agreement that this identity is established via awareness, then how is the primacy of awareness (an identity known experientially) abandoned for the sake of primacy of matter (an identity known theoretically)? I anticipate that this will reduce to what is the true metaphysical nature of identity. — javra

I agreed that in evolutionary theory, the global constraint of natural selection preserves identity. So the environment of a species acts to stabilise its identity. If the environment doesn't change, then neither will the species. The causality is contextual. The environment acts as information that regulates species identity. And it can do so because there is the genetic memory to capture that as actual information. The genes can remember the identity that the environment demands. In effect, the genes can take the environment's point of view of what some individual of the species ought to be.

Dissipative structure theory is about how identity persists due to environmental negentropy. A tornado is kept alive by the thermal gradient off which it feeds. Then life has the extra trick of being able to form a model of how it ought to look from a natural selection point of view. It has a self-identity now as it can milk dissipative gradients "at will" due to its control over its own negentropic structure.

I can paraphrase this from a different point of view: the ultimate end is the actualization of absolute order wherein a) all conflict vanishes and b) all imperfectly integral identities become an objectively perfect identity/unity. — javra

That's a good translation.

Physical entropy--to distinguish it from IT notions--is merely the process of taking paths of least resistance toward the grand finale of this absolute order--thereby being determinstically driven teleologically toward the final end of absolute order. Negentropy, were it to approach this grand final (which is itself metaphysically determinate as end) via its top-down causal abilities, would via its own freewill become more determined/determinate in its actions toward the requirements of actualizing this ultimate end - thereby itself becoming ever-more entropic (following paths of least resistance toward absolute coherence/unity/accord/etc. given contextual constraints). — javra

You are now talking about entropification at a more subtle level. But my view then is the dissipative structure one where entropy and negentropy go hand in hand. So rather than the usual simple-minded story - "thermodynamics = disordering" - I am talking about the self-organisation of the structure which creates those paths of least resistance.

So yes, there is an entropy gradient everything slithers down. But only because of the negentropic construction of that gradient.

The Big Bang couldn't have gone anywhere unless it had crystallised a three dimensional spatiality - a directional volume within which to cool/expand. The Universe had to build its own internal heat sink to dump all its hot energy somewhere.

As far as teleology goes, it is hardly the grand kind of purpose that folk traditionally want to credit existence with. Folk want something ringing and exalted to give meaning to the cosmos.

But so what? Maybe organising a Heat Death seems merely a "tendency" within the pansemiotic telic hierarchy of {tendency {function {purpose}}}. But it is what it is.

To me, purpose/telos is intrinsic/immanent to awareness. — javra

But bio-semiosis agrees that purpose is internal and agential and first person when it comes to organisms. They have the right modelling machinery - ways to code and remember.

And then with physio-semiosis, this is what is missing. There is nothing inside a tornado with which it regulates its being, maintains its identity. All that information is contextual - part of the structure of the world in terms of the weather patterns which swept the tornado into local being.

So the semiotic approach can track telos or top-down finality across that epistemic cut separating life and mind from brute dynamics. It explains both an underlying continuity and the sharp disconnect.

The changes that 'transcendental theism' are concerned with, are first-person. — Wayfarer

The question of how to be a better self is an important one. But my argument - as you know - is that the self is a bio- and socio-semiotic construction. So the answers would have to be naturalistic ones, not transcendental.

Of course, that evolutionary view of religion means that one would understand in an anthropological fashion why a good religion would capture a lot of social commonsense. So one would endorse religious moral wisdom without then having to believe in the ontic claims that are meant to give transcendental authority to that wisdom.

You for instance focus on vagueness as an ultimate beginning; I instead will affirm that the ultimate beginning is unknowable by us *. — javra

Again, if one seeks division, one can always find it. But I'm seeking the third path that lies between the very familiar cultural positions of materialism and theism.

So vagueness is just a word to talk about unknowable beginnings in a rational - that is, retroductive - fashion. If two complementary things came out of creation - like mind and matter, or information and dynamics, or constraints and degrees of freedom - then logically the ultimate beginning is where these two things fold back into each other as a naked unformed potential.

I like "vagueness" as that comes from Peirce's attempts to get to the root of logic, or reasoning, itself. If you want to come at metaphysics from a psychological or idealistic direction, then vagueness seems a very natural category as it speaks to states of experience before it speaks to states of being.

And vagueness is about information and uncertainty. Your point is that the beginning is unknowable. Calling it a vagueness is agreeing that it is a state of maximal uncertainty. Then putting on a physics hat, we can understand that in materialistic terms as a state of maximum quantum indeterminism. And when that in turn is understood in terms of the spatiotemporal general relativity, we can cash out a description of a vague beginning as a maximally fluctuating geometry - a "realm" with the most extreme imaginable curvature.

So that is what I am seeking. A jargon that actually does translate smoothly from one metaphysical point of view to its "other". Whether we describe creation psychologically or physically, it really means the same thing.

You view the ultimate end as a materialist form of nothingness (to not confuse it with Eastern notions of emptiness, for example); — javra

Well, sort of. The Heat Death is the finality of natural habit becoming eternally fixed. The laws of nature are finally fully expressed.

So not exactly a case of nothingness. A state of regulated lawfulness has become definite and classical, having started out vague and quantum.

I instead will affirm that the ultimate end—though its occurrence is contingent on the choices of all co-existing agents—is one of awareness unshackled from the limitations/constraints of space and time (even that which pertain to mind and its thoughts), and, hence, from the boundaries of selfhood (and otherness) … — javra

Pansemiosis would be saying a similar thing, but in terms of infodynamics - consciousness not being accepted as "a thing".

So yes, in the current era, there is complex semiosis. You have life and mind on Earth doing its best to break down accidental blockages in the greater entropy flow. But in the end, dissipation will become as simple and universal as possible. All particular points of view will disappear. As cosmology describes it, there will be nothing but the cosmic event horizons and the quantum sizzle of black-body photons they radiate.

So in a sense, "consciousness" - as another word for the process of semiosis - developed and grew complex in the current era. It was located at least on one planet as a human mindfulness. And this is truly exceptional as an event. These human creatures could have the self-reflective capacity to develop a form of semiosis - abstract scientific modelling using mathematical language - that looked to speak to the existence of the Universe itself. That's stunning, no doubt.

But in the long-run, the Universe will head for ultimate semiotic simplicity again. The work will be done. It can rest, forever coasting into the future as the ultimate peacefulness of a Heat Death.

(Yep, some rhetorical flourishes of my own here. :) )

By saying “yup” in you previous post to me, I take it you agree that evolution can be partially simplified into a universal common denominator of “preservation of identity”. How do you propose that identity is established if not via awareness which, as awareness, identifies itself as same/identical to itself and different/non-identical to other? — javra

Well the difference here is now that you are arguing for the bounding constraints to be caused transcendentally from without, whereas I say they arise emergently and immanently from within.

So it is in fact an evolutionary position. What works is what survives. There might have been an infinite variety of possible states of constraint. But one of them would have been the best - the best at doing the job of constraining the identity of the world in a way that caused the world to keep reconstituting itself. And so that particular way of organising things would have won through by definition. History is the story told by the winning side.

Again this is a fundamental physicalist concept. Quantum theory understands collapse as the sum over all quantum histories. And as a theory, this path integral approach has been demonstrated to more decimal places than any other physical theory - as with the calculation of the magnetic moment of an electron.

https://phys.org/news/2012-09-electron-magnetic-moment-precisely.html

So quantum theory is far weirder than any theistic metaphysics in most people's eyes. Yet there is nothing hand-waving about it. It produces the most precise predictions humans can manage. And the metaphysics it employs is about how things begin in a state of vague everythingness (or anythingness) and then that is collapsed by a principle of selection to find a stable identity. Every electron has a little more magnetic pull than it should, according to classical conception, because every electron feels the same "ghostly" contribution of all the other "kinds of interaction" it could have been.

When transcendental theism comes up with facts about the detailed state of the Universe that are as remarkable, profound and challenging, then maybe metaphysics would take more notice of its attempted ontic contributions.

Of course quantum theory is said to struggle to account for the observer half of its formal equations. So that seems to give wiggle room for "consciousness as a transcendental thing". But in fact "observation" is being reduced to thermal decoherence. The informational structure of the Universe in general is doing the (pansemiotic) observing. The path integral or sum over histories story is being generalised so that it applies to the persisting Universe as a whole, not just to the persistent identity of its fundamental particles.

So the theist wants to make the ultimate observer the mind of God. But that is just so clearly anthropomorphic as to be a non-starter.

Some theists then try to create a story of immanent divinity. The purpose which drives the development of being is a different kind of "stuff" woven into the fabric of the Universe rather than the big daddy in the sky.

But talking about a spiritual substance as the source of agency is just good old fashioned dualism still. It perpetuates a mystery.

And as I say, the cultural war is between a scientific view which in the end has dematerialised its own materialism, and a theistic view which has produced nothing of note in a metaphysical sense these past 500 years.

Where are any new ideas, let alone the evidence that stands tested to the precision of one part in 1.5 billion?

He was not an atheist. But he also said his theism was unlike that of others.

So you are still trying to play the game of theism wins - or rather, the theism that maximises transcendental causality, the intelligence that stands outside the world it creates.

Peirce was explicit enough that his theism sought to maximise immanent explanation. His God would be the least kind of transcendental being. The "divine" becomes another word for pure creative potential.

And my point is that the same goes for the atheistic materialist - once they are thinking in systems fashion. Material being is inherently spontaneous or indeterministic - as quantum theory avows.

I was just adding something to my last post that covers that.

As I argue, everyone wants to bat for one side or the other - brute materialism or creative intelligence. So everyone reading Peirce will feel compelled to demonstrate that he too is really speaking for one side or the other.

But what if Peirce - as both a scientist and philosopher - was striving to find the middle path that could do justice to both, without collapsing back into either?

To be explicit, I’m using geometric points as representations of aware agents. — javra

Speaking then for a physicalist naturalism, I would make a few points.

A geometric analogy is fine. The very thing of a mark can be understood to bring into sharp contrasting existence the "other" of the general plane whose unmarked symmetry it breaks. There is now a world divided into the locally marked and the globally unmarked.

You are likely familiar also with Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form (or Peirce's existential graphs) where the primal act of symmetry breaking is imagined as the drawing of a circle. That is now not just a geometric move, but a logical move. The point has an interior and space is marked by a boundary. Logic can be built up by crossing and re-crossing that boundary. As a conception of semiotic origination, it has its advantages.

And the Peirce imagined it all in terms of flashes of chance or spontaneity - a conception that is more physicalist as it unites space, time and energy in the notion of a primal action or fluctuation. But also, starting with a chance action is more compatible with a mentalistic ontology. It speaks to a fundamental freedom or creativity. So if Firstness or vagueness is the unformed potential that is lacking in all otherness, the most neutral conception of the first step in creation is a pure undirected action of some kind - not merely a geometric mark but an energetic move.

As Peirce put it:

The existence of things consists in their regular behavior. If an atom had no regular attractions and repulsions, if its mass was at one instant nothing, at another a ton, at another a negative quantity, if its motion instead of being continuous, consisted in a series of leaps from one place to another without passing through any intervening places, and if there were no definite relations between its different positions, velocities and directions of displacement, if it were at one time in one place and at another time in a dozen, such a disjointed plurality of phenomena would not make up any existing thing.

Not only substances, but events, too, are constituted by regularities. The flow of time, for example, in itself is a regularity. The original chaos, therefore, where there was no regularity, was in effect a state of mere indeterminacy, in which nothing existed or really happened.

Our conceptions of the first stages of the development, before time yet existed, must be as vague and figurative as the expressions of the first chapter of Genesis. Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something by the principle of firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it.

Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow.

We have no reason to think that even now time is quite perfectly continuous and uniform in its flow. The quasi-flow which would result would, however, differ essentially from time in this respect, that it would not necessarily be in a single stream. Different flashes might start different streams, between which there should be no relations of contemporaneity or succession. So one stream might branch into two, or two might coalesce.

But the further result of habit would inevitably be to separate utterly those that were long separated, and to make those which presented frequent common points coalesce into perfect union. Those that were completely separated would be so many different worlds which would know nothing of one another; so that the effect would be just what we actually observe.

http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/bycsp/guess/guess.htm

And of course, modern quantum cosmology would say this is the right way to understand cosmic evolutionary beginnings.

The Big Bang started in a particular state - the Planck scale. A state of maximum fluctuation. Being as hot or energy dense as it was possible to be, it was as energetically curved or spatiotemporally disconnected as it was possible to be.

In the very first moment, there was no spacetime backdrop as such as every point of spacetime was so furiously energetic as to warp its own spacetime like an isolated black hole. But the Planck scale was also the "size" where each hot point could first align with its neighbours to start to share relations and so begin to thermalise. Spacetime could start to shed its extreme local curvature and begin to become connected and flattened. Energy could spread and cool. Classicality emerged.

So the modern geometric approach would understand spatiotemporality as the converse of energy density - a fundamental quanta of action. And this would be represented graphically as curvature. A phase transition where a realm of hyperbolic curvature at every point of space became connected and so collectively flattened as all that unaligned action became aligned in a common direction - a cooling/expanding cosmos running down to its "other" of a perfectly flat and absolutely cold Heat Death. And because this flattening, this act of cooling/expansion "takes time", time itself emerged as a thing to mark change.

So rather than a geometric point or even a logical cut, modern theory supports a conception of Firstness or Apeiron as a hot fluctuation, the moment spatiotemporal curvature hit a balance between hyperbolic curvature (a point that curves away exponentially from any nascent dimensionality) and then by definition, that flat dimensionality which is the "other" that now exists as the ground from which any such curvature could be said to exist. Already, you get both sides of the deal from the one act, just like breaking the symmetry of a blank piece of paper by marking it anywhere with a black pencil dot.

Abstractly tying this into evolution, I speculate that evolution can be boiled down to “preservation of identity”. — javra

Yep. There is a selection principle at work with a physicalist concept of creation as to persist, the world has to work. The constraints that emerge and come to dominate must be the constraints that can globally stabilise.

[EDIT] In case it wasn't clear, what I like about Peirce's "psychological" habit-taking approach is that it tries to stand half way between the two dualistic extremes of brute matter and creative intelligence.

So the first action is conceived of as a chance fluctuation. Both the materialist and the theist could find common ground in that because there is the irreducible element of creativity and agency in that conception, as well as the dumb energy of an action.

A fluctuation speaks to both order and chaos at the same time in being some definite suggestive move in a direction, but it is an act of no particular meaning or significance until, or unless, it also proves to have a context. It must spark the change which is the development of the coherent backdrop against which its own existence becomes a mark, a difference that makes a difference.

So firstness - conceived of naked fluctuation - is nicely poised between the antagonistic world views that demand we begin either with conscious agency or mindless physics. A fluctuation is the least creative thing as an action. But it is still irreducibly creative in being so purely spontaneous or uncaused. And also a fluctuation is very material in being a primal energetic spatiotemporal event.