If time means nothing to a photon, should it mean anything to any of us? — Mike Adams

Time means nothing to the photon, but it does mean something to any particle with mass. Relativistically-speaking, mass has a meaningful temporality because it can go slower than lightspeed. It enjoys a range of temporal rates that is bounded by absolute rest and the speed of light.

For a photon, we can say that its journey is over the same instant it began. Time as we think of it doesn't really exist for a massless particle. But a particle with mass "experiences" a range of clock speeds. So it makes a difference if my twin heads off in a rocket at near light speed while I remain in a rest mass inertial frame. One of us is going to look a lot older than the other the next time we meet.

Yeah. And so already you are pointed in the direction of seeking that missing thing as a satisfaction.

If satisfaction is actually impossible, then it can't really be said to be missing. Motivation remains the direction you want to take because it is "leaving something definitely behind by definitely heading in the exact other direction".

Instead of two beliefs, it is two separate notions of justification.

On one hand, there is what seems to be your idealist approach - a dyadic correspondence between what you believe and what you observe. And this is contrasted with the realist approach where the dyadic correspondence is between what you observe and how the world really is.

So what is needed to ground truth is the pragmatic or semiotic account which is triadic, and so can embrace both these correspondence claims.

Now it become the case that our belief or interpretation is connected to the world itself outside via the mediation of a sign.

So here, it is the number of coins in a pocket that has been proposed as the sign - the observable. And a mistake in counting shows that this sign could be an idea rather than a reality.

This seems a real problem. But a semiotic view says that is how signs work. They have to - somehow - have a foot in both camps and thus stand as the third thing in the modelling relation going on.

It is the same with dreams, illusions, imaginings, fictions and all the other ways we can have "sensations" that are "unreliable" when it comes to a correspondence with reality.

Genes play a part in determining the characteristics of the individual, but that's only a part. — Metaphysician Undercover

In biology, they are the determining part. What happens during growth or development is then that this finality gets mixed with a lot of particular accidents.

So the acorn is a one-off genetic template - a particular form that can only deliver that one adult tree. Sexual reproduction ensures a shuffling of the genetic cards to create a unique hand.

But then the tree grows. The acorn happens to have fallen on a stony hillside. One year as a sapling there is a big drought, another year it is hit by a pest invasion, eventually it gets hit by lightning.

So the mighty oak ends up a bit mangled in ways that the acorn's genome couldn't envision. Constraints may be top-down determining, but also the development of actuality is subject to irreducible contingency. There are many particular accidents of fate that get woven into the final form of the genetic intention.

So roughly the original envisioned oak emerges. And if not too beaten up, it can produce its crop of new acorns. Its biological goal has been achieved on the whole, to the extent it matters.

Again, you have brought the discussion back to a reductionist way of thinking where constraints must be absolutely determining. But organically, constraints only have to regulate contingency to the degree it really matters. Doing more than that is pointless over-kill.

Once you get that naturalistic systems principle, it is pretty easy to apply that to the discussion of brains and habits we were having.

I already made the point this is a one-eyed view - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/100361

You always stress the escape from negativity and ignore the approach to positivity. But it takes two to tango.

So what we really have here is an inherent direction that points the way to progress. For things to be even meaningfully understood as bad, the logically corollary is that they could be good. Thus your pessimism collapses due to its own first premise.

On a personal note, the first aha! moment for me was reading a 1976 SciAm article on Rene Thom's Catastrophe Theory as a biology undergrad.

http://www.gaianxaos.com/pdf/dynamics/zeeman-catastrophe_theory.pdf

You can see it covers abrupt changes of state in stockmarkets or rage/fear responses in dogs. So it gets at the kind of dynamics you raised in the OP.

I was really terribly bored by what I was studying in class. It was so reductionist. Catastrophe theory was an almost mystical blast of something utterly different.

But it was like a solitary trumpet call. At least given that one just did not have access to the "whole world of academia" back in those days. If your prof didn't know about it, you were hardly going to find out.

Then 10 years later, it all came spilling out of the closet as deterministic chaos theory, fractals, complexity theory, far from equillibrium thermodynamics, etc. Everyone was talking about it. And the spreading continues.

I'm glad you are checking out Life's Ratchet. To me, that is another such trumpet blast when it comes to establishing the physical basis of biosemiosis.

Powerlaw stuff is all about sorting out the story of self-organising material dynamics. Semiosis is then the follow-on issue of how life and mind can constrain that dynamics in entropically fruitful fashion using information.

And biophysics is identifying how this informational trick is something that "must happen" emergently at a particular nanoscale of being - the "edge of chaos" or transition zone which is the quasi-classical scale of atomic behaviour.

Such a beautiful and satisfying story.

Am I getting this right? — Srap Tasmaner

That's it. The popular account of all this has been the talk about fat-tail distributions, or seven degrees of separation - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/magazine/08wwln-safire-t.html?mcubz=1

Or as I mentioned, Taleb's Black Swan. Or "disintermediation" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disintermediation

So everyone is picking up on what is happening with the internet and now social media. People are inventing terminology left, right and centre.

That makes it rather hard to see that this is not just about the web. It is an absolutely generic self-organisational story.

Again, that Franks' article is excellent in identifying the fact that we are talking of two contrasting probabilistic regimes in nature - where before people thought there was only really the one, the good old bell curve. Now we are seeing that powerlaw (or log/log) statistics are not some kind of weird exception, but the other natural limit.

Instead of trying to assimilate all structure to Gaussian outcomes. we should expect nature to be fractal, scalefree, hierarchical, exhibit fluctuations over all scales, simply because of emergent probability.

Powerlaw behaviour is in fact more normal or basic as it is less constrained. It is the first stage of order that you get because "free growth", or dissipative structure, is the simplest form of emergent organisation. It takes the addition of limits on growth to then start to get Gaussian closed system behaviour where fixed limits force the system towards a single-scale mean.

Metaphysically, this is revolutionary. The Second Law of Thermodynamics would no longer be fundamental as it describes an already closed world in which entropy has an average. The lid has been put on the pot, as it were. Instead, you need a modified law - one based on dissipative structure, or Prigogine's "far from equilibrium" systems - that starts with powerlaw behaviour.

So Gaussian probability - the central limit theorem - was worked out first. But it is the more constrained statistical situation. We are now working out the models of statistics with the least possible constraints. And so while powerlaw behaviour seems weird and exceptional, it is really the more generic case in nature.

What type of predictions can be expected of complex system modelling with regard to cultural development in stratified societies? — Galuchat

Well stratification or nested hierarchical organisation is itself predicted by Barabási's scalefree networks. The emergent powerlaw statistics of airports will be a familiar example. Eg: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/39/15224.full.pdf

And now Bejan's Constructal Theory is pushing explicitly into social modelling. This marks a shift from purely statistical models to thermodynamical ones. Introductory chapt here:
http://www.springer.com/la/book/9780387476803

In general, hierarchy theory, which has been going strong since the 1970s, does explain hierarchical organisation in emergent terms. But that was more heuristic explanation and not mathematically developed models. Now the general mathematical models are arriving, as in the above.

You seem to be asking about cultural trends in particular. I would say that remains at the heuristic stage of argument. If you could pinpoint some trend of interest, that might jog my memory on relevant mathematical strength modelling.

But one obvious trend explained is how modern life is polarised by the contrasting pulls of specialisation and generalisation. We are both more homogenous and more diverse at the same time because we all get exposed to Trump/Kardashians/Bieber as our universal shared culture, and yet also the same social media lets us dive into the most obscure interests shared by a few.

Fifty years ago, everyone was clustered on a middle ground because TV had just a few channels. And homes, a single device. Now the internet has created a scalefree sociocultural environment. Going viral is now a thing - an emergent behaviour that is perfectly familiar.

I guess my particular slant here is then making the connection between emergence/hierarchy theory and Peircean, or even Hegelian, semiosis and dialectics.

So Peirce makes the logical and metaphysical point that all emergence must be grounded in Firstness or Vagueness - a state of pure potential or pure symmetry.

Then there is a symmetry-breaking or dichotomisation. One becomes two, as in dialectical thesis and antithesis. You get complementary bounds emerging - as in canonically, the local and global scales that are the basis of a triadic hierarchical organisation. See Stan Salthe on his basic triadic system in his classic, Evolving Hierarchical Systems.

So the emergent model is the Peircean one of an unbroken potential that breaks and separates in opposite directions, and having done that, becomes stratified because the two tendencies thus created get mixed - go to statistical equilibrium - across all available scales.

And it is very easy to read this into current world affairs. For instance, we have had 30 years of economic globalisation. And the natural response to that is a new call for economic localisation.

This is being read as a pendulum swing in politics. We went one way, now we must go the other. But really, political attention should be focused on the systems fact that an economic agenda predicated on liberated growth is going to go strongly in both these directions anyway. That is predictable. What will vanish from the system is the middle ground. Or rather, any proper mean or average scale of economic action.

So it is not either/or, but both - and both being expressed across all available scales of organisation. And we can then measure a "fully stratified" hierarchical organisation in terms of its approach to this powerlaw ideal of having no actual mean.

A non-growth system would be characterised by approaching the Gaussian limit of a precisely specified mean. A free-growth system does the opposite. And understanding this is pretty important if you want to have a sensible political conversation about the emergence of radical wealth inequality, or the "surprising" disappearance of the middle class.

. If the acorn grows, it will construct an oak tree (in general), but not any particular oak tree, the intent is something general. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps get someone to explain genes to you sometime.

As I explained, "top-down constraint" is formal cause, but this is inconsistent with "final cause" which gives the thing acting (the agent) freedom to choose a goal. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, no. Top-down constraint is formal and final cause bound up. Although - following the logic of dichotomies - we would also follow Aristotle in dividing constraint into its generality and particularity. So goals are general imperatives. And forms are particular states of constraint that would serve those imperatives.

Take the Platonic solids. You can place the general constraint on geometric possibility of limiting volumes to regular-sided polygons. So the goal is maximised regularity. And then you have the five forms that meet the requirement. These forms in turn can be used as actual limits which shape lumps of matter that have efficient causes, like the property of whether they stack nicely, or not.

The acorn becoming a tree, is a bottom-up action. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hardly. The acorn packs a genome - the product of millennia of evolved intentionality. You couldn't pick a worse example. The acorn - as a small package of carbohydrate and basic metabolic machinery - has to grow. It must construct an oak by constraining material flows for 100 years. But the fact it will be an oak is already written into its destiny.

Otherwise the human agent has no freedom to choose one's own goals, and this is inconsistent with observations of human behaviour. We freely choose our goals, they are not enforced through top-down constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

And so you again ignore all the science that has shown that this kind of "ghost in the machine" freedom is a dualistic illusion.

That doesn't mean there is no "freedom of choice". It means that we are constrained by our biology and sociology to act intelligently and creatively. We have the capacity to negotiate the balance between our individual wants and our social demands. And we can do that well, or do that badly. Selection will weed out what works and what doesn't.

Then what is the thing which is active? Global constraints and local degrees of freedom produce effects on what? — Metaphysician Undercover

You are locked into cause and effect thinking. A doer and a done-to. That is the mental habit you need to break. Aristotle ought to be a good start for any systems thinker. His four causes approach was the basis for self-organising entelechy. Material potential becomes actualised as it expresses its functionality.

This is interesting: — Srap Tasmaner

I think we all know this. But then the paradigm shift is seeing that it is a natural, probabilistic and self-organising thing. It is a mutuality or dichotomy that emerges through "pure statistics". That is why the new wave of system modelling - based on complexity and thermodynamical thinking - offers the right analytic tools.

And then the other paradigm surprise is that the statistical models themselves are polarised. We get Gaussian vs Powerlaw systems as the two limiting cases of natural probabilistic systems.

A few years back, Nassim Nicholas Taleb had a best-seller, The Black Swan, that expressed his surprise that the modern social world had become a case of Extremistan vs Mediocristan - http://kmci.org/alllifeisproblemsolving/archives/black-swan-ideas-mediocristan-extremistan-and-randomness/

Likewise there was an explosion of popular talk about fat-tail distributions.

But it was a surprise that anybody could be surprised. Once we started to get the computer power to handle non-linear calculations from the 1970s, an abundance of "emergent constraint" mathematical models poured out of science. Fractals, scalefree networks, etc.

So it offers a metaphysically-general shift in frame. We have got used to thinking of reality as a deterministic Newtonian clockwork. But actually it is all about emergent self-organising probability - the organicist or natural philosophy view.

That then is how I would analyse your example of a misplayed game of tag. You were seeking to extract some example of how a few strong actors might tip a much larger dynamical social order into a new regime - effect a phase transition. A modern probability based metaphysics makes that a right approach. It is a good starting intuition.

But then also - the point I made - this particular game could just be a breakdown in self-organisation. The lesson might be more about what now counts as unnatural about the situation described - like the short-run view of the system you were taking, and its very small number of possible interactions.

Thjs is surprising coming from someone who supports the idea of "final causes". What do you think final cause is, if not a dualist principle? — Metaphysician Undercover

I thought I've explained ad nauseum? It is a dialectical or dichotomistic principle. Final and formal cause are wrapped up in the systems notion of top-down acting constraints. They are matched in complimentary fashion by bottom-up acting degrees of freedom - a notion wrapping together material and efficient cause.

So Aristotle was the great systems thinker. This is what modern systems thinking looks like.

In any activity, there is always an "agent". — Metaphysician Undercover

Quotemarks are good. The agent should vanish if the systems account is working. We end up with a system that has the property of agency exhibited hierarchically over all scales of its being.

This is the thing which is acting, the agent produces an effect. — Metaphysician Undercover

But in the systems view, both the global constraints and the local degrees of freedom produce effects. Both the general context and the particular events are causal.

You claim to support the idea of final causes but then you describe human activities in your neuroscientific way, as if they are all efficient causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. That is just how you insist on understanding everything, no matter how regularly I correct you on that.

Unless you can describe an interaction between efficient causes and final causes within one model, there is no basis to your claim that you both support the idea of final causes, and deny dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. You really do never listen.

I wondered about this, but my guess was what mattered was the percentage. 25% is clearly enough, but my guess is that a much smaller percentage of the population could effect this kind of change. They wouldn't even need to conspire if there was an objective way the choose a target. — Srap Tasmaner

But is your tag game a good model from which to extrapolate? It has unnatural features like that it is a closed system - only these four kids are playing. If there were a large pool of kids and behaviour was observed over time, then more dynamical and self-organising conclusions could be drawn.

In a realistic game of tag - as nature plays it - would this one kid switch the system? Even in your tag game, the two others are just left out. They don't change their strategy. The smallest kid is the only other one who feels forced into joining in the mutual strategy switch. Wait a little longer, and doesn't the smallest kid get fed up and walk away?

So you are illustrating the breaking of a system, not the gestation of a new self-balancing state of system organisation. There just is no organisation unless it has a self-perpetuating balance of competition vs cooperation. There is a sort of cooperativity between your 2 and 4 for a while. But it seems one that must soon break down - 4 walks off - rather than being the new stable state with mutual benefits.

Yet another thought: I'm torn between the idea that cooperation might not be emergent and needs to be a first-class goal alongside competition, and the idea that market theory could be right. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, take notice of the background thought here. There are two views. Either we try to engineer the system like a machine, or we recognise the power of self-organisation based on a probabilistic view of nature.

So as I say, probability theory sees two kinds of natural attractors when it comes to "fair" outcomes, fairness being really another word for globally random and unbiased.

This is one of my favourite papers on the issue - https://stevefrank.org/reprints-pdf/09JEBmaxent.pdf

Should Bill Gates be taxed to bring him back within normal distribution bounds of wealth? Or is his wealth in fact fair because we want to create a social world that is exponentially growing and not stuck in a steady-state equilibrium in terms of consumption?

Fairness or randomness or cooperation are themselves globally emergent outcomes that can be polarised by two general settings when it comes to thermodynamical balance, or emergent natural patterns.

In such a story, our player 2 would not be a bully but an iconoclastic hero, the one who says the emperor has no clothes. — Srap Tasmaner

In probability theory, there are always fluctuations. The question is whether the system itself is at a tipping point where the perturbation makes a difference. In a perfectly poised system, like the weather, a butterfly wing flap can be the difference. In a severely constrained system, it would take something huge - bigger than itself - to smash things apart. You can kick the mountain and it won't fall. It would take an asteroid, or millennia of eroding rain drops, to do that. But an avalanche could just "give way" because of the tiniest vibration.

But again, your tag game seems too small a sample size to really show any emergent dynamics like this. You just have a kid taking it into his head to win in the easiest fashion. And you as an outsider see that as being against the rule of winning in tag being random. You want this tiny sample size to replicate your ideal of social dynamics where everyone has something they can win at, and so - as the corollary -
nobody wins at everything.

1 thought they were all playing 'tag'. 2 was actually playing 'get 4', a quite different game. — Cuthbert

Excellent point.

This is what I had in mind: there are theories that expect cooperation to be emergent from competition. — Srap Tasmaner

My systems science perspective sees competition and cooperation as the complementary local and global poles of social organisation. So while cooperation is emergent, competition would be so as well. Each needs the other to be able to definitely distance itself from the other. There is an inner drive to bifurcate towards one or the other state. Which seems disruptive as a dynamic. And yet also, hierarchical stability is achieved overall because cooperation is generalised constraint, competition is generalised degrees of freedom. There is a balance when the overall cooperation is forming the "right kind" of locally competitive behaviour. That is the kind of competition that is (re)constructing the higher level general constraints.

So a "fair" tag game has the implicit rule that individual interactions are randomly targeted. They should approach a normal distribution. One individual then flipping the other way - deterministically targeting one interaction - is going naked competition and that breaks the general rule.

In a big enough game of tag, there would be room to be a cheater like this and get away with it. You could target the easy to get kids as a group, or target one particular kid while also throwing in enough exceptions to look reasonably random to the rest. But your small sample size means that the distance between chasing fairly and chasing unfairly doesn't offer much room except to completely flip state from cooperative to competitive mode.

The emergence of strong cooperation in social groups is about the removal of the opportunities to cheat like this. An anthropologist noted that a tribe shared evenly all the food it gathered. Until they put up their tent and found individuals wanting to take the opportunity to hide food with the outsiders' help.

So it is a tricky thing. But consider how you are viewing tag as a lesson in social fairness. You want it to be a competitive game without winners. Players should cooperate to randomise the outcome to the degree that it is simply an accident who comes out top. And as parents of kids, that seems like a great lesson in life. Pure cooperation at work. Kids like it to. It is natural to enjoy being part of a crowd having fun and where winning isn't really the thing.

But then as we get older, then games become serious. Now there are meant to be winners. And so targeting the weaknesses of opponents is no longer unfair by the rules. You do need a much tighter game structure. Lines on the ground, enforced turn taking, all kinds of rules to create equality of opportunity. But while the cooperative structure of the game is thus made completely explicit - the chaos of tag becomes the order of Wimbledon centre court - so also the competitive element becomes sharply focused. The whole point becomes that it ends with a winner and a loser.

So as I said, social organisation is about this natural dynamic of competition and cooperation. Each is emergent from the other as each can only measure itself in terms of its dialectical "other". And this dynamic is vague in a game of kid's tag. Only parents standing outside would start to form the sharp rule that interactions ought to be self-consciously random. For kids, the chaos itself would be more the point - the chance to be inside a moment of learning how sociality works.

But then mature adult games are this kind of chaotic learning stage becoming clearly polarised. We form concepts of social equality and social order, as well as the matching concepts of individual striving and acceptable degrees of social cheating. How to be acceptably competitive is also something that clearly emerges for us.

How this relates to powerlaws or scalefree network models is then another story. A further complication. Enough to say that it is the difference between a steady-state system and an expanding one. A dynamical system that is static or not growing has an equilibrium balance that conforms to a normal distribution. One that is growing freely will conform to a powerlaw distribution.

So "global fairness" looks quite different in the two regimes statistically. It has a mean in one, and no mean in the other.

This is the reason why we are conflicted by the 1% and current social inequality. Why should an individual like Bill Gates be worth more than many nations? In a static world economy, wealth ought to be normally distributed. In an accelerating world, then wealth will naturally tend to a powerlaw distribution. That becomes the new random outcome. The bigger question is whether exponential growth is possible for long in a resource-limited world. But there you go.

I'm not a fan of dualism or homuncular regress. So sue me.

It would be difficult to identify final cause as constraint, because an agent is free to produce one's own goals — Metaphysician Undercover

Ah. Again the return of the agent, the mysterious witnessing and deciding self who is conscious. We are back to the ghost in the machine. Who needs neuroscience.

Quantum mechanics definitely challenges Newtonian determinism. But the answer on freewill and causality is more general. What is really needed is an "epistemic cut" between physics and information in a system for it to gain self-regulating autonomy.

That is, a living and mindful system is modelling its relation with the world informationally or symbolically - through a system of interpretive signs.

The disconnect or epistemic cut is clear to see in computation. The hardware takes away the physics essentially. There is still an energetic cost to powering the circuits. But the cost of any operation is made the same. And so physics drops out of the equation as a causal constraint. The software is then left free to symbolise any state of affairs. It is free in an absolute way to be anything it likes. It can invent its own private system of causality, like the logic of a programme that computes.

Now of course computation is just a machine. The epistemic cut is rather too complete. A computer is utterly severed from the world. And so human have to write the programs, build the hardware, act as a connection between the realms of material physics and immaterial information.

But organisms - life and mind in general - have an epistemic cut which is also then the basis of a lived entropic interaction. First, the physics and the information are separated. Organisms have various forms of memory that sit back from the metabolic whirl of dissipative physical action, like genes and neurons. But then this separate realm of information is embedded in an active modelling relation with the physical world. All the information is controlling physical processes, directing them towards desired ends.

So there is a tight feedback loop that spans the physics~information divide that has been constructed. Unlike computation, there is a two-way street where the information may live in its own physics-free environment, but it still has to build its own hardware, pay for its own entropic expenditure. Life doesn't have anyone to plug it into a wall socket. It has to also own the means of self-construction and self-perpetuation.

But when it comes to freewill debates, the essential point is that there is this basic epistemic cut which makes physics not matter. A zone of freedom is created by setting up an informational realm of causality.

Now that freedom is then tied back to the general purpose of being a self-sustaining autonomous or autopoietic system. So it is not the absolute freedom of computation, which has no embedded purpose. But it is the practical freedom that is what it is like to be a human concerned with getting by in the world, making smart choices about physical actions that will perpetuate our existence. It is freewill as the modelling relation that allows us to be plugged into the world we are making for ourselves, individually and collectively.

So really, when it comes to the physics, it makes no difference if that physics is understood as fundamentally deterministic or probabilistic. The epistemic cut upon which life and mind is based already filters that issue out. All that matters is that memory mechanisms can be constructed and material processes thus regulated via a modelling relation.

Yes of course. The basic idea that our conceptions shape our impressions is ancient. The Greeks realised that we have to read the ship on the horizon as a regular-sized ship far away and not some tiny miniature. What we experience is constructed.

And then the epistemic issue becomes central with the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Once we turn to the practical business of truly knowing the world, then the semiotic relation - the scientific process of reasoning that involves abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation - emerges as something explicit. You get Hume and the rest starting to spell this out.

To my understanding, pragmatism isn't generally considered to be a cohesive body of agreed upon thought that is acceptable to all of its adherents. — sime

I would say the historical situation is that Peirce formed an absolutely coherent view of pragmatism/semiotics. But then because of social forces, that never broke out the way it should have at the time. What came through into the public was the diluted Jamesian understanding of pragmatism (stripped of its semiotic backbone), or the Deweyian version (stripped of the metaphysical ambition).

The "true Peirce" didn't start to come through until the 1980s and 1990s. The start of his emergence was in theological circles. The radicalness of his metaphysics fitted with those wanting a more idealist philosophical basis. But then a proper interest in Peirce has developed - even if still off the mainstream map. Semiotics has become important in theoretical biology for instance. It is big in Spain and South America and Canada, and other places on the edge.

Peirce almost broke through in his own time, but philosophy was dominated by the UK, Germany and France. Harvard was some horrible provincial backwater of little account. And the Euro mood was also turning sharply to reductionism/AP. Peirce was offering a grand holistic logical scheme. The UK especially went with the shorn down logic of Frege. Peirce became just a background unacknowledged influence - a half-heard good idea that echoed but never fully grasped.

Again, it is not so surprising as he got into trouble with Harvard, went off into the solitary wilderness, never actually managed to publish a single coherent text to bring his mature vision together. He created no book to study. And it then took about 80 years for scholars to get through all the unpublished notes and papers to present a fair reading of a voluminous output.

So yes, Peirce's pragmatism/semiotics is utterly cohesive. And that totalising metaphysical view is itself considered a philosophical sin these days. No-one is meant to be able to make sense of it all in the way of an Aristotle or Hegel.

And then there are a host of non-philosophical reasons why Peirce's impact was only as a whisper in the ear of AP. And why Pragmatism is viewed shallowly in terms of the metaphysically and logically unambitious retellings by James and Dewey.

And we do this even if we don't expect to get "yes" or "no", but closer to "yes" or closer to "no", right? — Srap Tasmaner

I would put it the other way round. We know that to dichotomise strongly is the way to be sure that any answer is going to fall within the bounds of the possible. So the concern is about asking the question in the logically broadest sense so to ensure we encompass the whole range of any resulting answer.

We can't reliably get closer to either limit - yes vs no - unless we are secure about the fact that the limits actually limit. So bivalence is part of that effort of framing questions in ways that answers at least land inside their counterfactual bounds.

I could say that thing over there is either a gnat or a 7. You can see how hard it would be to assign a truth value to statements that don't properly suggest actual bounds on our uncertainty.

"AP"? — Srap Tasmaner

Analytic philosophy.

If this is the case, then how do we show how a conscious goal "acts" as a final cause to produce a chain of efficient causes (habitual action)? — Metaphysician Undercover

Attending releases the appropriate habits, while suppresing the inappropriate ones.

so the bridge between final cause and efficient cause would be found in the relationship between anticipation and habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

In broad way that is so. But habit is also final cause/constraint that has got baked in over a long period of learning. So the contrast is in an efficient division of labour in a time-pressured world. Habits represent finality that has been learnt to the point it is baked-in intentionality. Attention is then the finality we have to construct specifically to deal with the current moment in time.

It is confusing, I agree. But in terms of forming intentions, attention is much slower than habit because habit has already accumulated intentionality over a lifetime of learning. And attention is also much slower at executing in terms of efficient cause actions as again it is dealing with novelty and must spend time deliberating on the sequence of steps that might make some plan.

If I have to go to the bank and the shops, I can decide which to do first. But it might take a few seconds to work that out. Or if instead it is a learnt routine, I find my feet just making that choice for me. I am turning left rather than right before I've even had time to think at the road junction.

So both attention and habit are separable systems. And being systems, each requires the same structure - finality and efficient cause in interaction. Or constraints vs degrees of freedom.

Yet then in a broader sense, they are an integrated in themselves - each a specialisation of brain function in the two directions of economical habit vs effortful attention. One then seems to be all about the component actions, the other about the broad plan.

Anticipation of the shot, which produces preparedness, is just as important as habit, if not more so. — Metaphysician Undercover

I thought I said that. Sprinters must really concentrate their attention so that nothing stands in the way of responding as fast as possible to the gun. They must suppress all possible distractions and maintain a vivid impression of the event that is expected. And it can be so vivid that you get false starts.

So attention creates states of focused sensory anticipation/motor intention. Everything that can be got ready is got ready - to lower the informational barrier and make the processing as fast as biologically possible.

I've been in more than one car accident, driving, where the scene unfolds very quickly, but I've always maintained conscious control over how I operated the controls of the vehicle until the end. — Metaphysician Undercover

Alternatively time slows. The fact that attentional level processing doesn't have time to make sense of what is going on leaves us with the feeling of the moment being stretched out and lasting an eternity.

And then you say you were in conscious control. Yet sports science will say the best that could be the case was that you were in the usual zone of responding out of trained habit, then afterwards there was a reportable working memory as attention fixed a record of the blur of events.

So it is your belief against the scientific evidence here.

Since attention is actually a habit, the better dichotomy would habit/anticipation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, relabel the same things anyway you like. It makes no difference. I just go with the standard labelling that has emerged in psychology and neuroscience.

My only quibble is that "anticipation" is useful for signalling another paradigm difference - the switch from "consciousness" as the output of a representation, to seeing it as about predictive modelling. It is anticipation that comes first. And then that acts as a selective filter on awareness which allows us to in fact ignore as much of the world as possible.

So yes, if habit is then understood in this light as what we can manage to ignore (because it is already predicted), then it is just the relabelling of the same functional dichotomy.

So attention really only gives to our minds what has occurred, the past. Now we need a principle, such as anticipation, whereby the fact that something is about to occur, is present to the mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I already said that "consciousness" involves both the half second before and the half second after. So the fact that attentional level processing is slow means that it is there in advance of the moment, and there afterwards mopping up. First it generates the prediction that allows most things to be ignored. Then it deals with what in turn couldn't be ignored. After that, we have a tidied up impression of the world that can be filed as reportable memory.

Would you also describe this as the process of becoming "less and less wrong"? Is there a succinct way to describe that without presupposing a bivalence of right and wrong? — Srap Tasmaner

It is scientific reasoning. So I guess bivalence might be replaced by the null hypothesis. We propose that X is a hypothetical cause of an observable. Then we presume the existence of measurement error. And so we compare X to the null hypothesis - the counterfactual that the observable is caused only by randomness in the system in question. There is always going to be false positives due to irreducible chance or indeterminism (in the world, or in our acts of measurement).

But bivalence is not wrong as a tool of inquiry. We can't test anything unless we frame the alternatives crisply. We have to formalise a claim in terms of a definite yes or no question.

However then, we should recognise this is a necessary quality of our epistemic tool and not of the world. The world itself could be vague foundationally. So bivalence is simply a way of formalising a definite hypothesis. And (following Robert Rosen) our acts of measurement are then the informal part of the business. What counts as an acceptable degree of measurement becomes bound up by the purposes we might have in mounting an enquiry after truth, and so how easily we might feel satisfied. It is tacit knowledge - what counts as good enough - that AP theories of truth don't really appear to recognise.

Scientific reasoning instead actually does pay close attention to the business of making measurements. It has well developed probability theory (which Peirce pioneered) to make measurement as "formalised" as possible, despite the fact that a hypothesis is forever going to be a guess that suggests its own "sign" or answering measurement.

Guesses embed their preconceptions in a way that can't ultimately be avoided. So pragmatism would be about controlling the consequences of that situation.

So when it comes to bivalence, note that Peirce was explicit on how to handle it as part of his work on logic.

Vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply. Ultimately crisp bivalence fails as states of affairs are simply vague or indeterminate.

And then generality is that to which the law of the excluded middle fails to apply. Again, ultimately bivalence ceases to make sense once there is no longer any particularity to speak of.

So bivalence is great and effective in positing a world of crisp particulars - a state of affairs in which things are are the case, or are not the case. And that metaphysics can take us almost everywhere we seem to what to go. We don't have to worry about the limits of knowledge as so much can be logically inquired into using this tool.

But once we get down to theories of truth, we are talking about the limits of a bivalent framing. And Peirce says flip it around. Accept that fundamentally things will be vague. Uncertainty rules at ground level - and it doesn't matter because our own purposes place epistemic limits on how much we even could care. Let's not pretend to worry about things that don't in practice worry us.

Unknowability just doesn't look like a big deal in this context. People act on what they believe to be true, or even believe to be probable, and either is rational. You could even know, for a fact, that a proposition has arbitrarily high probability of being true without knowing that it is true; that's surely rational grounds to act on. — Srap Tasmaner

Pragmatism would flip this on its head by saying everything is probabilistic. Reality is not deterministic - in the fashion conventional thinking about true facts or states of affairs presumes - but is instead only a constraint on indeterminism.

That means there is an element of chance or creativity in every act of "verification". We can frame a proposition as a deterministic choice - the principle of bivalence - yet then the measurement process itself can only be informal in the end, as on the fine-grain, nature can still fool us, as Gettier cases illustrate.

So the job of proposition verification is not to establish deterministic certainty - that is impossible. But what we can demonstrate transparently is a reduction in uncertainty. We can aim to reduce indeterminism to the level of what we deem mere probabilistic noise.

In asserting a truth, it is a practical fact that there is a level of error that matters (because we are asserting with some purpose in mind) and then a level of error where we are no longer bothered any more, so it makes no difference whether the facts are either "true" or "false". Or determinate vs random.

Take the height of Mt Everest. As a mountain climber, it doesn't really matter if it is X metres high, give or take another minute or two of climbing. At some level of truth-telling, our interest fuzzes out. The pull of the moon might have some measurable effect on Mt Everest so its "true height" changes by nanometres constantly all day. But this becomes noise - unless we establish some purpose that makes a more exact measurement seem reasonable.

And then doing that is probably going to change the very assertion anyway. I may have to concede Mt Everest doesn't "have a height" in the simple fashioned sense I was trying to posit. At the nanometre scale, it all becomes relative or vague as reality doesn't come with that kind of fixed measurement baseline.

So the point is that AP agonises about truth because it embeds a certain metaphysics. Pragmatism rebuilt theories of truth by advancing a quite different metaphysics. One worries about arriving at certainty. The other concerns itself with the regulation of uncertainty. Pragmatism accepts verification is a practical affair closely tied to interests. So that justifies acts of verification petering out in vagueness or noise - whether or not that is due to ontic or epistemic reasons.

It could be that we just don't care beyond a certain level of fine-grain detail. Or it might be that there just isn't any fine-grain detail to be had - as quantum indeterminism suggests. Either way, pragmatism works.

James was a good psychologist but a weak philosopher. The holes in his version of pragmatism were obvious. Peirce felt forced in the end to rebrand his pragmatism as pragmaticism because of that.

As Misak says:

The question of how Ramsey became an advocate of pragmatism is a fascinating piece of intellectual biography. He was as unhappy as Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein with William
James’s suggestion in his 1907 book Pragmatism:

Any idea upon which we can ride . . . any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor, is . . . true instrumentally. . . . Satisfactorily . . . means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, everything here is plastic. (James 1975, 34–35)2

It was Peirce’s more sophisticated pragmatism that influenced Ramsey

The question, then, is why a neutral "naturalistic" description is desirable, or why a neutral description is seen as superior to a description with normative undertones. Is it purely on the basis of scientific "objectivity", or is it also perhaps a psychological defense mechanism of sorts? Is it not easier to "deal" with an apparently savage reality by construing it as blind, purposeless, unintentional and amoral? — darthbarracuda

Scientific objectivity is a bit more than "construing". It is the evidence based approach. And it is metaphysically systematic in assigning causality. If you ask a question, it splits things into immediate and distant causes. It has a hierarchical approach to explanation.

So you suggest that science would merely neutralise our feelings here. Somehow your belief in "savage reality" can be presumed to be correct - because you feel that way - and any other view, no matter how differently founded on a system of reason and evidence, must be an ego defence mechanism.

Sure, it is possible to use selective facts to explain away something unpleasant. But the argument is that you (and your cite) are employing selective facts to make that unpleasant case in the first place. You are referencing observations like female diving beetles burying themselves in the mud. So it becomes rather contradictory to both cite science and decry science in bolstering a position.

My argument is that a naturalistic approach would put rape in its full objective context. Being "scientific" here means already being alert to the probability that causality is complex - a hierarchy that runs from general constraints to particular triggers. So that is metaphysically normative - a way we all ought to handle important questions. And that is an established norm your essay fails.

And then your characterisation of "scientific reality" as "blind, purposeless, unintentional and amoral" is also a view that biology - the science of life and mind - would challenge. Sure, that is a view that became socially popular following Newtonian mechanics. But plenty of my friends in theoretical biology see purpose and intentionality - some grade of telos - even in the laws of thermodynamics. It is not impossible that the facts should cause a revision of a now 500 year old view of nature as a blind machine.

Then don't forget that my actual reply was not that nature is neutral. I said a biological/sociological view would be that what is natural is a dichotomy of competition vs cooperation. With a balance that is then "fit" in terms of long-run survival. So for example, one expects both a general species-typical reproductive strategy and also localised opportunistic cheating. Each pole of action is equally necessary and natural. You have to have constraints. You have to have degrees of freedom. The evolutionary judgement is then on the balance of these contrasting impulses across a time horizon. Does the overall dynamic work in an adaptive sense?

So you are adopting a catastrophising metaphysics were things are either right or wrong. If rape is wrong, then rapish looking behaviour is just as wrong. And in the end, anything in the remotest construable as rapey is wrong. There just is no smallest degree of rape that isn't wrong because you have no demarcation line where rapey behaviour becomes either instead a positive - as in a shift from globally cooperative reproductive strategies to locally competitive reproductive strategies. Or indeed, it just becomes background noise - so insignificant that it doesn't count as action of either kind.

And again, I also question the way you frame rape as an issue of biological reproductive strategy. Making babies never seems the point. At most, you could point to sexual gratification - a desire to copulate which is biology's way of making babies without you, the male, having much say. So yes, there is an element of causality there. But then scientifically you would want to put that in the context of all the evidence. Don't men also have an instinct to father, nurture and protect? And doesn't actual rape have more to do with biological strategies of submission and dominance? Humiliation rather than breeding may be the prime cause to analyse. And so - if you are being a radical feminist pretending to present a biological case - you would look to what nature says about dominance~submission as evolved behaviour.

There is a lot to say about how to think about these issues properly. But it is clear that the essay just doesn't.

The position presented in the essays is that we can't absolve patriarchal problems within the patriarchy itself. It's radical feminism. Fixing these issues can only happen if the patriarchy itself is dismantled. And in this case the patriarchy is traced back in time through millennia of biological evolution. Rape, battery, violence, etc can not be solved though conventional means but only through the eradication of the patriarchy (which is oftentimes theorized to be connected to capitalism and religion). — darthbarracuda

Again, there are two stories here. Either it is the case that A is good, B is bad - a simple-minded monochrome tale of causality - or it is the case that A and B are the necessary complementary extremes of being that are the foundation of a complex adaptive balancing act.

So perhaps patriarchy and feminism are two poles of a fruitful social order? It is only the balance that is at issue as "the West" transitions from an agricultural social economy to a techno-democratic one?

You are suggesting that there is no end to guilt because no lines can be drawn on history. Yesterday's ways have to be either right or wrong. They can't just be different. This is catastrophising. And it leaves you unable to analyse as you are not accepting the metaphysical principle that reality is irreducibly complex. It always takes two to tango.

It's hard for me to imagine a male with a vagina that is actually a male. Male-ness seems to be inherently tied to the capacity to penetrate, flood, neutralize and dominate. — darthbarracuda

You have an image and can't get beyond it. But is that inflexibility of thought reasonable?

Yep. See https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/download/2946/2607

As Schop says, a general reply is that nature is a balance of competition and co-operation. So rather than reducing the issue to a debate where cooperation = good vs competition = bad, the informed question is what is the appropriate balance, and is that being met?

Also, humans are different from animals in having another evolutionary level of behaviour - the sociocultural level brought about by having speech to structure our biological relations. That raises the question of whether a social construct like "rape" can really apply in a strictly biological setting. It may. But that is still a part of the argument that needs to be made properly. Can an animal be immoral or have evil intentions?

Males might not be "intrinsically rapists" as the essays annoyingly imply, but I don't think it's implausible to say males' physiology evolved as to maximize the chances of spreading genes, which oftentimes means rape. — darthbarracuda

In a general sense, male animals would seem to have an interest in spreading their genes. But biology also sees that there are two possible strategies - r vs K.

In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring. The focus upon either increased quantity of offspring at the expense of individual parental investment of r-strategists, or reduced quantity of offspring with a corresponding increased parental investment of K-strategists, varies widely, seemingly to promote success in particular environments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

So either males and females can spread their seed to the winds, or they can focus on fewer offspring more likely to survive. And note this is a cooperative story as it is a reproductive choice being made at the species level.

Of course you might then see a secondary competitive story within this general species strategy. It might be in the interests of males - or females - to game the system to their personal advantage.

If the reproductive strategy is based on quality - parental investment - then wouldn't you expect the selective pressure to be on just that? And while cheaters would exist, there would be selective pressure to prevent it?

Humans of course, more than any other species, rely on heavy parental investment. Or rather, communal investment - it takes a village, etc. And social structures have developed to support that. The prediction would be that "rape" would be rare in a stable, well-balanced, social situation. Or rather, that rape would be construed differently. So socially accepted if a child resulted and the man was forced to marry and support the girl, for instance in Olde Englande.

I am not defending any particular behaviour. I'm just answering in terms of evolutionary logic. Rape becomes a definite thing in modern culture because that culture so clearly makes a violent ignoring of consent a big issue. We want a world where nothing is done to us against our wishes. It is a general mindset that applies to both sexes. And as a cultural mindset, it is also either going to prove adaptive or not in the longer run. A naturalistic view doesn't presume that there is some moral absolute position here.

So in general, all this talk about biological parasites, sexual violence and rape as a reproductive strategy is too obviously over-wrought to be taken seriously as actual biological hypotheses. Rape is obviously a social and cultural problem. If you want to fix it, turning it into a cod evolutionary debate is hardly sensible.

Do you think people rape people because their aim is making babies? It is not to do with sexual gratification? Or more probably, power and humiliation?

Turn it around. Imagine women had a dick, men had a hole. But men - or a subset with social issues - still had a rage to humiliate. Would the shape of the biological equipment make a difference?

What we are looking for here is the motivation to get something done, and this is prior to any such a division. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are forgetting that my approach is quite different from yours on this. Again, you want to boil things down to the effective causes of behaviour. And that leaves out the complementary role played by the final causes.

So should "motivation" be entirely a question of "what local thing triggered this action"? Or is motivation a big enough concept that it includes "what global goal gave form to action itself"?

I of course defend the latter.

So the motivating factor is to be found within these internal parts, rather than within the conscious mind. But to motivate the will power, is the closest thing we have to motivation without activating habits, because the will power to refrain from action is to deny the action of habits as far as possible. So it is the motivation behind will power, what motivates willpower, which is the motivation to resist activity, that we will find the purest form of the motivating factor. — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't this another way of saying that attentional level processes can constrain our habits in fruitful fashion? I will respond out of learnt habit unless I take time to watch what I am doing and impose some kind of working memory/prefrontal plan on things?

Again we are back to a division of labour. I want to be able to do as much as possible without having to think about it. But I also want to be able to stop and think about anything that needs a non-habitual response.

So back to the power of a functional dichotomy. Two styles of processing are better than one. I want to be in control when it matters. I also like an easy life where I can let routine stuff take care of itself. Most of the time, this itself feels like a seamless and automatic habit. The two ways of processing the world are so smoothly integrated that I don't need to pay attention to any join.

But in high pressure, fast moving, situations - like playing sport - the fact that the processes are quite different in things like temporal scale can really show.

There is not enough time to consciously plan the throwing of a pass. There often isn't even the time to do the quicker thing of simply halting a subconsciously unfolding action plan. Free won't is faster than freewill. Yet even then, we find ourselves often thinking oh shit, shouldn't have done that, as the body is already launching into action.

So you are stuck on the usual reductionist regress of trying to find "the self" that wills the body to act. If I flex my little finger voluntarily, it seems that I must of commanded it, because it just happened. And yet I can't actually find any thought or effort that "I" delivered at that precise moment to make the finger move. It just as much felt as if it moved by itself. Because it suddenly felt like it.

As long as you are focused on finding a trail of effective causes, an organ like the brain is going to be a mystery. But ahead of time I can decide - at an attentional level - to form a state of constraint that regulates my little finger. I can say the general goal is to flex in the next few moments. Go as soon as you like and I won't stop you. I have a clear mental expectation of what should happen, and what should not happen - like I don't want the little finger of my other hand to do the flexing. So I have restricted my habits of finger moving in a very specific and attentional fashion. Pretty much the only thing the habit level brain can do is move in the way expected. So for all its varied propensity, the probability approaches 1 that it will emit the response that has been attentionally anticipated.

It is a different way of making things happen. Organic rather mechanistic.

The body's habits are a whole collection of potential routines or degrees of freedom. I could break into a moonwalk at any instant. It is just one of umpteen learn possibilities. Then attention does the other thing of restraining the space of possible actions until only the one desired action becomes the probable outcome. I form the goal of moonwalking and the whole of the brain becomes motivated in that behavioural direction as every other option has been momentarily suppressed.

Attention is a habit acquired in an evolutionary sense. The brain evolved that propensity in that it is baked into the inherited neural architecture of higher animals.

But also, that evolved brain architecture favoured the division of labour that I've mentioned - attentional level processing for dealing with novelty, habit level processing for dealing with the routine. So what was acquired as large brains developed through evolutionary learning was a strong dichotomisation of what we would call habits and attention. The taking of habits also evolved.

So sure, we can step back and take the really long-term perspective, and this is what we see. The cerebellum and basal ganglia are also particularly large in humans.

Thus if we are talking about the functional architecture of brains as it is actually divided, you are talking out your hat as usual. You are thinking like a reductionist in wanting to reduce two things to one thing. But an organicist can see that a division into two things is how you can arrive at the functional harmony or synthesis of an effective division of labour. Study brain science and you will discover that it is all about this principle of complementary logic.

I'll throw in another reference for you - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complementary-nature

Habit is a learnt propensity. Attention is how you learn a propensity. It ain't difficult.

No words. You are saying the Dutch can't be a tall as a national characteristic because some happen to be short? You just reject ordinary statistical concepts?

Sure. You mean like Pragmatist philosophy of mind? Or do you mean to reference some other philosophical position? Give me a link so I can get an idea of what philosophy you have been studying.

In the meantime...

Although James plays down attention's role in complex perceptual phenomena, he does assign attention to an important explanatory role in the production of behaviour. He claims, for example, that ‘Volition is nothing but attention’ (424).....

James's somewhat deflationary approach to attention's explanatory remit means that, when it comes to giving an account of the ‘intimate nature of the attention process’, James can identify two fairly simple processes which, he claims, ‘probably coexist in all our concrete attentive acts’. and which ‘possibly form in combination a complete reply’ to the question of attention's ‘intimate nature’ (1890, 411).

The processes that James identifies are:
The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs, and
The anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centres concerned with the object to which attention is paid. (411)....

Here, as in his more frequently discussed treatment of emotion, it is distinctive of James's approach that he tries to account for a large-scale personal-level psychological phenomenon in a realist but somewhat revisionary way, so as to be able to give his account using relatively simple and unmysterious explanatory resources. An alternative deflationary approach—one which James explicitly contrasted with his own—is the approach taken in 1886 by F.H. Bradley.....

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/#WilJamHisConDefThe

Alright, I'll try to piece something together. — praxis

Cool.

Yeah sure. That's totally believable.

But I am asking you directly to make it clear what you might think be our essential point of difference in this thread. Time to put up or shut up.

It was a simple question and you don't seem to want to answer.

Why don't you just come out and explain what is bugging you so much. I mean in terms of the philosophical positions being taken. Your personal neuroses count for nothing. But I am asking you directly what argument you mean to defend here - or pick a fight about.

So are you agreeing with creative's argument? Or is that what you are labelling a satire. :)

Creative says we can't extract traits from population samples. Which would be news to most folk. Is that a position you also mean to defend here?

You seem upset about something.

Because of dissatisfaction. No matter how complex a behavior, it comes down to that. — schopenhauer1

Alternatively, action can be motivated by either a desire to move away from something or a desire to move towards something.

In operant conditioning, this is shown by the fact that removing a negative reinforcer can strengthen a behaviour, and providing a positive reinforcer can also strengthen a behaviour.

So the complexity of behaviour would in fact be reduced to the dichotomy of pleasure and pain. Everything is not merely an escape anymore that one would argue everything was an approach. The positive and the negative are both motivators.

But you do not seem to recognize attention as a habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's probably a habit I picked up from studying psychology/neuroscience.