But does it make sense, in response to the question "What is Time?", to point to a clock? — hypericin

Well if you believe a clock can actually measure time, then surely that answers your own question?Whatever a clock is, it represents the way you already conceive of time.

So you're trying to justify logic, in terms of other criteria that are external to it. — Wayfarer

But there is still a reason why we might choose one axiomatic base over another. The laws of thought have got to seem self-evidently right.

That is, every normal person learning about the principle of identity or sufficient reason should feel aha! , yes I get it, at least the first few times they think about them.

And it is that forging of an emotional bond to a logical precept that then makes it so hard to get people to question the foundations of their belief systems of course.

The brain evolved to evaluate the world. So you see what is happening and then how you feel about it is part of the overall reaction. If you see a snarling dog, one part of you might be searching for a rational plan of action. But the other needs to be gearing you up physiologically in terms of the machinery of fight or flight.

So thinking and feeling always go together with perceiving. It's a package deal. The body has to be aligned with whatever "intellectual" choices are about to be made.

Then the same applies even to just evaluating our own planned actions. When we think about what we might do next, our emotion centres (to put it ridiculously crudely) respond to the picture we start forming. We get a positive feeling about whether it is going to work or not. We can feel aha!, exactly right. Or oh no! this could go very wrong.

Hitting upon the right answer that connects the dots of an intellectual puzzle is exactly the same as finding a mango tree when you are lost and hungry in the woods. The brain lights up with the same physiological orientation response. Your pupils dilate, your attention narrows, your heart rate changes. It may be just the answer to a puzzle, but you know the answer in fact feels right because you have this conviction in your bones - or at least in the neurotransmitters of your autonomic nervous system.

So to use syllogistic reasoning is a rather dry and learnt habit. But we then believe the results of such a process of assembling evidence in a cascade of steps because we can feel it all actually does fit together in recognisable fashion.

Or often we can see the argument seems to work yet we feel troubled. That is where we might look more closely at the premises until - aha! - we spot with satisfied conviction the flaw we seek.

So really, on one level, all this reasoning is very dangerous stuff. We end up believing anything only due to some emotional reaction. We check in with our rather subconscious and automatic orienting responses and discover which way our feelings want to point us.

But on the other hand, our evaluative responses are highly evolved and pretty reliable for most real life decision making. So the trick is educating people to actually reason in a dispassionate fashion - or rather, to create the kind of fact-checking mindset where every step of any argument is fully exposed to a passionate response of the type that actually motivates strong self-questioning.

You may be right that negation is built into the structure of the brain, as in on/off switches, but I think it is thought that turns these switches off for the most part. — Cavacava

Selective attention can certainly modulate the receptive fields of neurons in top-down fashion, either suppressing or enhancing their responses.

So what you say is right - if "thought" is understood in terms of attentional processes. It is certainly what would be meant by thought in pre-linguistic animals.

Researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo believe that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals. — Cavacava

I've only got the time to quickly skim the paper.

But it is certainly reasonable in a general fashion. One of the things we know is that the lower level limbic system control over human expressive noises - our rather involuntary acts of swearing - had to have a higher level motor planning control built over the top.

So that is why you get Tourettes, for example. Humans evolved new connectivity so pre-motor areas - what we now call the grammar areas, but which are just as much tool using or other complex action planning areas - could start to over-ride the more instinctual or emotional level of vocalisation. And Tourettes is where the wiring doesn't quite give full control. And also why we actually shout fuck or shit, or some actual word, when we hit our thumb with a hammer.

So the paper's connecting of bird song and honeybee dances is a bit strained. Not wrong, but you can also talk more directly about the known neuroanatomy of the brain and see that speech is a combination of complex goal-directed planning and simpler emotional social expressiveness.

That is why speaking does always involves both what you say, and how you say it. Prosody feeds in from another part of the brain to give every word an appropriate social inflection.

Nevertheless, whenever you talk about 'constraints' at all, then - why those constraints? — Wayfarer

That is focusing on the material questions. And I am stressing the semiotic dimension to existence.

So the fundamental question in that light becomes about the historical inevitability (or conversely, the contingency) of the critical levels of semiosis.

The Planck scale would define the most basic scale at which something pan-semiotic happened. There is a reason why three spatial dimensions was the optimal solution for organising a dissipative chain reaction - the emergence of the Big Bang universe as a cooling-spreading heat sink of radiation.

Then life would be another level of semiosis. And biophysics has indeed discovered that there is a particular nano-scale thermal regime - poised between the quantum and classical scale - where molecular machines can organise cellular metabolism with almost magical effectiveness.

And also over the past decade, biology has realised that another very remarkable semiotic transition had to take place at the scale of bacteria and archea. These simple single cell lifeforms, on their own, could never have evolved into anything more complex. And yet each - in arising as complementary ways of milking work from respiratory chains and proton gradients - could then get combined to allow large multi-cellular life.

In essence, archea could ingest bacteria and turn them into mitrochondrial power-houses. The waste product of one kind of simple life could become the fuel being produced inside the other form of simple life, closing the dissipative loop in the one creature.

So no, you won't see much if you just focus on the material aspects of being like most cosmology does. You have to have the larger semiotic perspective to see what were the critical transition thresholds and so make some judgement about the historical inevitability/historical contingency of what followed.

For example, the theorising about archea and bacteria symbiosis would seem to dramatically narrow the probability of complex life ever arising. Only an organic chemistry that was very earth-like indeed could seem to do the trick.

But anyway, then after single cell genetics and multicellular genetic combos, you then get neural semiosis and linguistic semiosis as further crucial advances in semiotic mechanism. And mathematiical cyberspace could be next.

So what I mean by constraints is the semiotic approach to constraints, not merely a materialist approach.

But I don't want to convey the idea that I believe in 'God's plan' in any kind of literalistic sense. There are other religious models - the Hindus see the Universe as 'the creative play of Brahman'. Buddhists don't even really concern themselves with 'how it all began' — Wayfarer

From memory, it was Conway-Morris who is Christian and so wrote in ways sympathetic to ID. Eastern philosophy is generally more immanent and organic in its thinking as you say.

However, there's an interesting philosopher of biology, called Simon Conway-Morris, one of whose books, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe makes a similar kind of case in elaborate detail. — Wayfarer

So that is the intelligent design argument? God created our particular kind of Universe because it had the constraints within which Homo sapiens becomes a historical inevitability?

I think I go one step further than that. ;)

I say constraint itself has a logical inevitability sufficient to conjure up worlds. You don't need a God of the Blue Touchpaper to figure out the initial conditions. Platonically, some kind of semiotic organisation or regularity can do it all for itself, no need for a divine maker.

Whereas the transition from primitive hominid, to upright, language-using, cave-painting hominid was relatively rapid, i.e. the last 100,000 years. — Wayfarer

Well upright walking hominids have been around for about 5 million years - an evolutionary response to the retreat of the jungles with climate change.

And then the use of fire is at least 800,000 years old. Stone-tipped spears were being used 500,000 years ago.

And it can be argued that the spectacularly life-like cave paintings of animals betray what is in fact a simpler stage of language sophistication. They seem eidetic, and so painted by minds less structured by a linguistic habit.

If you check kid's art, they paint houses and people as if they are assembling a collection of words. A crude circle for the head. A few dashes to represent hair or fingers. It is the opposite of photographic in being linguistic.

So yes, hominid evolution has been rapid - in ways that can be explained primarily by rapid climate change. Why did Neanderthals die out? Were they too physically adapted to the ice ages and so it was the lighter bodied, but bigger brained, lineage of Homo - us - that had the more general purpose design that could survive through warm and cold abrupt climate shifts?

So it depends on your level of magnification whether the story looks gradual or abrupt. But certainly, the rise of civilised Homo sap - wearing clothes, living in small villages with a hierarchical social organisation and rich ornamental culture - was much too abrupt for it to be explained genetically.

And the most plausible way to account for that degree of shift is that Homo sap was pre-adapted for articulate speech, the climate then allowed Homo sap to flourish in population numbers, and then the social density/complexity was the fertile ground on which a new social habit - speaking in grammatically organised sentences that supported rational trains of thought - could quickly (over just a few hundred generations) get established.

As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation — Wayfarer

Well that might be how you think of the prefrontal cortex. But as you say, there was only the relative enlargement of areas, not new areas evolving. So if you are claiming that some part of the brain is responsible for abstraction and conception in a big way in humans, then by the same logic, it does the same in a small way for squirrel monkeys and lemurs.

What is indisputable when it comes to sharp discontinuities is that the human vocal tract is unique. And the brain changes that went with that are really just an increase in the top-down connectivity needed to have intentional control over what comes out of the mouth.

It is like the opposable thumb in that regard. Or even bipedal walking. Standing up right allowed us to carry stuff across an open landscape. Carrying stuff meant there was a reason for hands to become specialised for manipulation and thus pre-adapted for a culture of tool-making.

So for paleoanthropology, there is a reasonably standard way of explaining the co-evolution of bodies and culture. And it doesn't need to involve hopeful monsters.

And speaking of 'walking through the door', the transformation to the two-legged gait, when combined with the enormous enlargement of the fore-brain, required the development of infants with soft skulls, due to the narrowing of the birth canal (which also lead to large increases in infant and maternal mortality compared to earlier primates) and also the requirement for very long periods of extrasomatic adaption, again very unlike that of the preceding species. — Wayfarer

Again you are ignoring the gradual story. Bipedalism wasn't a problem for early hominids as they still had small brains. But it did then become an issue as brains got larger.

The result was that babies got more immature and helpless at birth. So this would have driven the need for a particular level of sociality and technological sophistication in late hominids (as compared to even extremely social chimps). And being born with barely formed brains would also have made late hominid infants far more "programmable" by whatever their cultural environment happened to be. Again this is a pre-adaptation. There was a natural window of the first 7 years in which the rather unnatural thing of grammatical organisation and phonemic structure could be hardwired by experience.

So there are lots of pieces to the puzzle that fit together quite nicely.

Even adolescence looks to be a relatively recent evolutionary change. The brains of Homo erectus up to 400,000 years ago seem to jump straight from the child to the adult. But we have a further 10 years of teenagehood where the highest levels of impulse control and social thinking are still busy maturing.

So every thing about our brain maturation is stretched out in ways that apparently maximise the chances for culture to get in there and shape the patterns of what goes on.

Again, the popular view of human evolution - to which Chomsky falls prey - is that it is all about the magical development of the thinking and feeling self conscious human individual. This is the romantic picture of the ape that found its rational soul.

But the science supports a much more prosaic co-evolutionary story of culture and biology, All the action when it comes to the impressive intellectual advances are about cultural evolution - the rationally-structured habits of thought that language enables. Human biology - via a mix of accidental pre-adaptation and consequent purposeful fine-tuning - then changed as much as it could to support that cultural evolutionary trajectory.

So it is culture and the collective that led the way, not the genetics and the individual mind.

Chomsky thinks that humans language ability arose from a single mutation about 100,000 years ago and it quickly spread. — Cavacava

That's an example of where you can go off the rails if you can only think about recursion/negation in crisp computational terms.

To Chomsky, it seems like the basic trick of articulate speech is an all or nothing affair. And therefore, if the ability for language is biologically based, it had to emerge abruptly as a "hopeful monster" mutant.

But neuroscience should tell you that recursion and negation are a generalised feature of brain architecture - brains being organised by dichotomies and hierarchies. So the kind of nested hierarchical organisation that characterises syntactical speech acts is simply the general rule for all motor planning. Even opening a door or chipping away a flint axe is a hierarchically developed plan with general intents and a sequence of sub-acts.

So what Chomsky sees as the hard part - the evolution of recursion - is already a general fact of brains. It is just that other kinds of motor act are less socially programmatic, more fluid and dynamic, than grammatical speech. The rules for opening doors and chipping flints exist, but only in a much vaguer or more localised sense. They are task specific assemblages, not universalised and abstracted.

The far more plausible evolutionary hypothesis is the "singing ape".

Hominids are social species and making emotional or expressive noises communicates a lot of useful information. Chimps screech and howl and chatter. So there would have been selective pressure that would have led to an articulate vocal tract in early humans. A greater complexity of noise-making would have justified changes to the mouth and throat so that air could be vibrated and bitten into phonemic chunks, and chained together with syntactic variety.

It is in fact quite a neural feat to be able to control the vocal cords so that distinctive trains of noise can be produced at the rate of five or more contrasting sounds a second. The underlying morphological changes would have taken at least a few hundred thousand years to evolve, and so must have had a good justification just in terms of the advantages in social co-ordination they allowed.

So we start with apes making analog expressive noises - the screeches and mutters that communicate indexically by how loud or soft they are, how angry or reassuring they sound. There is modulation and pattern, but it varies in continuous fashion and so any communicative distinctions are vague. It is noise making of a kind that couldn't represent the sharp binary distinctions of symbolic logic, for example. Well a chimp could hoot a morse code perhaps, but that level of binariness is unnatural even for us.

Then as an extension of this, hominids developed the trick of vocal digitisation. The voice box, throat, tongue and lips all changed so that rapid and distinctively varied patterns of noise could be produced.

Exactly when this happened is controversial. There used to be good arguments that Neanderthals lacked the vocal equipment of Homo sap - no fat tongue in an arched palate, no dropped larynx and altered hyoid bone. But now the evidence seems to be swinging towards Neanderthals being more human-like both in vocalisation ability and symbolic capacity.

But whatever, the morphological changes involved are all standard gradual genetic adjustments. Nothing new needed to evolve. It was just the shape of existing structures being tweaked. So that argues for a steady reason for a direction of change that pre-existed the cultural development of actual grammatical habits of reference. But once the vocal machinery had been refined, then it would have been only a matter of time before the habit of rules and words got invented.

So in paleolinguistic circles, Chomsky's hopeful monster story seems puzzlingly naive.

However Chomsky is an arch-rationalist/semi-Platonist and he sort of argues what I argued partly in jest - that the Cosmos has ideas it wants to express, and we are its evolutionary vehicle. So the habit of universal grammar is like Turing computation or Boolean logic - something so damn mathematically true that it was just lying there in wait to pounce as final cause. As soon as some creature evolved vocal equipment (or in Chomsky's view, neural circuitry) that contained the basic digital elements of computation, such as the power of recursion and negation, then the whole weight of abstract symbol processing machinery was going to come tumbling out of the closet.

As I say, I agree on this. It is what has happened. Humans lucked into a semiotic regime where suddenly there was all this sequentially ordered, computationally rational,stuff just waiting to exert its machine like grip over the world. The evolutionary leap was not about us humans as thinking individuals. It was about the eruption of a mechanistic social order that could interact with the entropic world in its own new way - a way that expresses universalised abstraction.

But Chomsky is wrong in thinking the genetic advance was about some computational novelty arising in individual brain structure - and that in itself immediately unlocking computational or rational thought capacities.

As I argue, the computational novelty was far more prosaic - the rise of a digital noise-making ability which, with its sequencing demands, put a new kind of constraint on the already hierarchically organised brain. From there, it was a short step at the cultural level to stumble into the vast possibilities opened up by a collection of minds all getting organised to think and speak in a language-structured fashion.

Give or take the interruption of a few ice ages, the exponential development of Homo sapiens in terms of symbolic culture and collective rational control over the environment is then clear in the historical record. A door had been opened and we walked right on through.

We can imagine space as a 3D euclidean space, divided into a mesh of invisible little points or cubes. Motion then has an absolute meaning, as moving with respect to this mesh. — hypericin

But you have then added the extra thing of a change in location to your static grid. So now there is something extra in the this grid world that is not fixed to a location. And its position can change in regard to location in a way that you would feel moved to describe as where it was "previously", where it is "now", and where it could be in the "future".

So you started with a spatial grid and smuggled in notions of matter and time to create a model of a world of objects in motion (or not, if their positions are seen to be unchanged during the time that other objects do change their position).

But what if we treat time as a 1D line, analogous with space? Then, unlike with space, every object is at the same point, and moving through time at the same rate. Which, unless you imagine absolute points along this 1D line, analogous to the lattice of cubes in space, is also like saying that every object is motionless in time. Or, if you invoke relativity, then objects are only moving in time to the degree that relativistic effects are observed. — hypericin

But that is just to treat time as a further spatial dimension. If time actually was just like that, we should be able to travel backward in time with the same ease we move forward. And we should be able to remain at rest in time.

So while a spatialised representation of time is useful, it doesn't seem true in a deep way.

What physics is working towards is a thermal model of time which accounts better for its apparent character. So time now becomes the rate at which the contents of the Universe in general are cooling as - spatially - the Universe expands. There is an entropic curve that the entire Universe is running down at a general rate.

So now we can look at the most general material feature of the Universe - the cooling and spreading bath of cosmic background radiation. Everywhere, the temperature of the CMB is falling at the same rate. It is changing at the same speed. And this now gives a concrete backdrop of steady change against which we can measure different local rates of change.

It defines simultaneity in terms of a standard temperature. Right "now" the cosmic time is 2.725 degrees above absolute zero. And there is a thermal arrow that points from when the Universe was hotter to when it will be even cooler still.

So time is how we can measure change in terms of whatever it is that we can find as not changing. And time also has some intuitive features - like a locked-in forward direction, and a universality in terms of there being some common "now" where everything in some sense stands in the one spot - that a spatialised Newtonian model is not good at representing.

Therefore we need better ways of modelling time that produced these other features in a more intuitive fashion. Talking in terms of temperature rather than location is a way to do that. Even if we are standing still, we can see that a process of entropification means we are getting older and colder at the same general rate as the entire Universe.

Or can we dispense with time altogether? Everything is just process, at rates relative to each other and nothing else, in an eternal present? I am ignorant as to whether physics actually requires an ontologically existent time, as opposed to a formal notion which makes the equations work. — hypericin

Don't forget that the rate of change we care about most is that of massive objects. Light travels at only its one speed (and so, for lack of comparison, radiation is pretty "timeless"). Massive objects are free to move at any speed between rest and c. So massive objects have the kind of variety relative to a pair of absolute bounds on motion that lets us talk about them moving at different rates in comparison to this backdrop difference.

So when you are talking about the speed of mass x, you are saying it is y times faster that being at rest, and z times slower than being at c. That is why masses appear to move "inside" time. There is both an upper and lower absolute bound that between them define a range of meaningful speeds.

Mass always thus exists somewhere on a spectrum of speeds. There is always a faster and a slower from wherever they are now.

Or at least this is the case for the Universe as it is thermally right "now" - a Universe that is largely in its classical regime being neither so hot and small that it is a Big Bang bunch of thermal fluctuation, nor so cold and large that it is just a "red-shifted to buggery" Heat Death sea of thermal fluctuations once again.

What if the reason for the development of language is precisely the need to express abstract thought? — Barry Etheridge

Or it could be the step that allowed human culture to think. The necessity could lie in sociality achieving a concrete memetic presence in the evolutionary game itself.

Again, a dyadic way of thinking about origins always has to decide which is chicken, which is egg. Humans obviously evolved to get where they are. So either the power of abstract thought came first, and speech became the way to express those ideas to others, or the communal habit of language came first, and abstraction became possible through the use of this new tool.

You can argue either as the necessary first step forever and a day because - dichotomously - each is the perfect "other" of the other.

A triadic view recognises that both sides of the equation do in fact emerge together. And then can be "caused" - in finalistic fashion - by their future outcome.

So cultural evolution was already a (vague) fact even before articulate speech came along. It can be seen in the tool use and other survival practices of chimp troops and other primates even.

But then this nascent level of memetics - that we can say encodes a preformative desire in "wanting to join the evolutionary game as fully as possible" - got properly expressed once human language finally started to take shape.

A lot of tool use didn't really change the game for culture. But the tiniest inkling of speech suddenly broke things wide open. Culture could express its latent desire to exist in fully autonomous fashion. A play of abstraction, a play of symbols, could become part of the wider evolutionary game.

So in a sense, language could be the product of the needs of abstract thought. But now this doesn't mean that Homo sapiens had evolved an individual biological capacity of abstract thought that needs its expression. We are now talking rather more Platonically of the Cosmos as a realm of ideas that had to have a speaking animal to use as the vehicle of its expression.

One minute, we were hunter-gatherers slathering our faces in red ochre and painting magical eidetic images of our prey, the next we found ourselves spouting the eternal truths of maths and philosophy, eventually even science. The Universe had discovered us as its suitable mouthpiece. :)

Of course I am exaggerating the cosmic-ness of it all. But the point is to illustrate that we habitually think about issues of origination as a problem of bottom-up construction. For humans to start speaking, they must have already had a definite reason. And a frustration at not being to articulate the big ideas buzzing around their brains seems the kind of definite reason - the crisp first cause - that has persuaded many in the traditional "thought first vs language first" philosophical debate.

But a triadic logic allows for finality to be a true cause of origination. Abstract thought - of the definite kind we are now familiar with - could have acted to favour the evolution of articulate speech right from the beginning. Even the tiniest first steps towards organised symbolism - words and rules - was an opening that was going to grow itself every wider.

It established a disconnect between individual psychology and social mental habits that was hierarchically-enduring, and so also the most powerful form of connection. The constraints organising individual minds no longer depended on those minds but became cultural-level systems themselves in inter-tribal and inter-generational competition.

But I am arguing that time has no absolute speed. We can easily accept that motion can have only a relative speed, this accords more or less well with our intuitive understanding of motion. But with time, it is much more difficult. It clashes with the intuitive notion that time is plodding forward at a constant rate.

So the problem remains: there are at most minute measurable differences, in most cases, in the relative speeds of time. But there is no such thing as an absolute speed of time. And without a speed, how can time, as we understand it, operate at all? — hypericin

What you are dealing with is that change or flux can only be measured with absoluteness if we can establish some absolute backdrop of stasis or a complete lack of change. And in the end, we can't find such an absence of dynamism. We can only find a relative absence to construct our desired backdrop for measurement.

So our notions of time are an attempt to arrive at an image of "least change". That is is why you find yourself talking about a Newtonian model of time as a spatialised dimension - a line with points. And then why you worry about why motion along this temporal line should be itself constant and not variable in its speed.

But you give your own answer already on that. If everything was "sped up" or "slowed down" by time changing its speed, it would make no difference. It would be the same as if the speed of time was constant anyway. And so, the whole question of "what speed is time moving at" can be seen as irrelevant. Treating time as a Newtonian dimension is already as simple as it gets. To have a global dimension that is eternally there in always the same fashion is already the least amount of change that can be conceived.

This should be apparent from Newton's own classical laws of motion. Constant linear motion or constant angular momentum are inertial - a form of change that is not really a change in dynamics. A rolling ball can roll forever at the same speed. This is a consequence of time being a "statically existing" global symmetry. A realm of objects in eternal inertial motion is already as rock-bottom unchanging as you are going to get.

But Newtonian dynamics has been found to be too static even with its already irreducible degree of "constant change". Relativity required a more dynamical picture on the large and cold scale, quantum mechanics required it on the small and hot scale.

So time is just the way we talk about measuring change. And that in itself involves establishing some general backdrop of relative "no-change" against which we can then measure the other thing of some particular or local change.

This is why the very notion of time appears to be based on the "necessary self-contradiction" of being a static or unchanging backdrop thing. It is the fixed container of everything that changes.

But even with Newtonian time, critical aspects of the dynamics of things are made part of the global picture. Inertia - the kind of motion that is constant - is a universal property of masses. So Newtonian physics simplified our notion of time in putting the cause of constant motion "elsewhere" in its physics. But as we moved towards the kind of physics that could unify our notions of spacetime as a container, and matter as its contents, inertial motion came back to haunt everyone. Time had to be reimagined in the more dynamical fashion that could underpin relativity and quantum mechanics.

It allows this because negation is what allows language to refer to itself (it introduces recursion into language) insofar as to say 'not-x' is to refer to one's use of language, rather than some positively existing entity. — StreetlightX

I agree in general, but I think it is more technically precise to talk of dichotomies or symmetry breaking rather than negation alone, and of hierarchies rather than simply recursion.

The point is that a logically crisp idea like "never" has to arise not just as a negation, but as a dichotomous division. It's logical counterpart - always - has to arise in mutually grounding fashion.

So we can imagine a basic distinction in language - frequently~rarely. And then through inductive generalisation or abstraction, this becomes the absolute distinction of always~never.

Now this shift to proper abstraction is hierarchical rather than simply recursive as recursion is already happening at the level of the dichotomy. Even the notions of frequently and rarely are negating each other in self-referential fashion. And always and never are a stronger version of this self-referential act of mutual definition.

But the strong version of the dichotomy brings in the further thing of the concrete representation of the global symmetry they break. Always and never appeal now to the backdrop notion that is eternal time.

Frequently and rarely speak about the occurrence of events - the foreground action. Always and never make it clear that they are the absolute poles marking the extremes of some idea still larger than themselves. They point hierarchically to the third thing which is "time", the global symmetry from which they could spring as a dichotomy.

So a hierarchy is about the memory, the backdrop higher level idea, that can fix a local distinction in a definite fashion. It stabilises a negation.

No doubt this might seem a pedantic analysis, but it makes an important shift from a dyadic to a triadic logic of sign relations. Negation and recursion frame matters in terms of this against that - A vs not-A, and the repetition of a distinction. Complex reference might emerge as a result, but it is essentially unaccounted for. It simply is treated as emergent in an open-ended fashion.

But a triadic sign relation closes the story. Unlike negation, the dichotomy has recursion built in as each half of the dichotomy refers to its "other". And unlike recursion, the hierarchy explains how dynamical uncertainty (where is recursion going to lead?) gains generalised stability. The third player in the triad - the global symmetry that the local symmetry-breaking claims to break - is itself now named. Always and never get their meanings fixed in terms of the further notion of time, a temporal dimension.

Triadic sign relations also introduce vagueness and asymmetry in natural fashion.

Dyadic logic always demands counterfactual crispness. The middle gets excluded. It only wants to speak of either/or. But triadic logic creates room for middles, both as points of departure and places of arrival. Middles are what get developed by dichotomisation or symmetry breakings. You start off with a vague potential and break it into a definite spectrum of states bounded by two complementary poles of being.

So frequently~rarely is a little vague as a dichotomy as it simply states that some thing is either more or less. And then always~never takes that nascent relation to its crisp or absolute limit - a polar pairing that then admits of every intervening shade of "occasionally".

Likewise, triadic logic is large enough - it has enough dimensionality - to speak directly about asymmetry.

Symmetry breaking comes in degrees of hierarchically-fixed definiteness. The simplest and most unstable symmetry breaking - because it is single-scale and easily reversible - is a negation. It is like positive and negative charge. You can produce both for free from the splitting of "nothing", but then they are so weakly separated (so eager to get back together) that they annihilate back to nothing in the next blink of an eye.

So to fix symmetry-breakings, a separation must be achieved across hierarchical scale - an asymmetry must be formed. And this is what a hierarchy does. It disconnects the global from the local, the global becoming a state of "memory" for the system, its long-term prevailing constraints, while the local becomes its individual degrees of freedom.

In the example of always~never, time is the general idea that stands orthogonally to the notion of "the event". The event itself can freely either be or not be on the local view. It seems a perfectly reversible state of affairs - a fluctuation - at that level. But step back into the background notion of time and now the event can be seen as either always or never (or occasional, periodic, intermittent, unpredictable, etc).

When it comes to language evolution, the triadic point of view allows for negation and recursion always to exist vaguely in any language use. It is there in weak form even indexically. I could shake my head to signal negation, in the way any infant would twist away from food it didn't like. As a metaphoric sign, it could gain meaning quite naturally, building on already dichotomised and hierarchically integrated reactions of approach and avoidance that we all share as part of the same biological inheritance.

But language proper is a machinery for a social memory. Habits of abstraction can become fixed in a way disconnected from the individual and held collectively as named ideas. So as you say, that makes all the difference in the world. There is the open-ended meta-possibility of infinite levels of recursion or self-reference.

So the idea that basic language - some kind of proto-speech - must have preceded more advanced language is problematic. The essential trick - the division of communicative intent into words and rules - must have been there from the start.

Again, the standard approach to language evolution relies on dyadic logic. So either the habit of naming, or the habit of grammatical organisation, must have come first, in this view. There is the classic chicken and egg dilemma that dogs anthropological speculation.

But a triadic logic has the advantage that if words and rules are the dichotomous elements of speech acts, then they must co-arise, being each other's context. The habit of abstraction is already built in from the get-go, even if its first expression is a vague as hell.

However reasonable the explanations sound, however habituated we are to accepting them, how do we in fact justify our faith in an elaborate structure very different in nature from the play of shapes and sounds that make up our experience? — Dominic Osborn

You are reverting to a demand for absolute knowledge when I am describing what can be justifiably believed as the result of accepting a particular epistemic process - pragmatic reasoning.

So it will always be the case that scepticism wins against claims of absolute certainty. I accept that.

But then I shrug my shoulders and get on with life in the most well-founded way possible. And that is to follow a process of empirical reasoning based on hypothesis and test. Even "stuck inside experience", we can divide our experience into the ideas we hold and the impressions that result. I can have a theory about physics and then I can read the numbers off a dial. It is all "just experience". But it has now a structure in which what I think is causally tied to what I see.

So it is not just that the explanations sound reasonable. They look reasonable. I can directly experience the consistency of the connection between my ideas and impressions.

I am asserting that the “play of symbols” is Reality itself. That it is not about anything, that it is not in fact a play of symbols at all, that it is an illusion that it is about anything, and an illusion that there is something that it is about.

This assertion is a rejection of the noumenon. It is a rejection of the material world. It is a rejection of anything outside my mind. — Dominic Osborn

Fine. But if we can achieve a tight causal connection between our ideas and our impressions by presuming that there really is a world out there acting as the third thing of a constraint on our acts of interpretance, then why would we have any good ground for disbelieving in such a vital prop of our state of experience?

So your inconsistency would be in depending on the noumenon to justify the game having a consistent structure, and then - for no other reason than that absolutism entails scepticism - turning around and rejecting the noumenon.

You see the self-defeating paradox in what you argue? The noumenon is required to get you to the point that it is sufficiently established that you can then "meaningfully" reject it.

If you don't really have any strong thoughts about the noumenon, its existence is neither here nor there. To accept it, or to reject it, makes little meaningful difference.

It is only after you have strong reason to believe in it, that you can meaningfully talk about turning around and not believing it.

So sure, scepticism just comes for free with strong belief as a crisp rational possibility. If you can say yes, the very meaning of "yes" is that you could have said "no". But just because you could have said "no" doesn't mean no is now the right answer - what you ought to be saying instead.

Thus there is always the formal possibility that the noumenon is not the case. But you would be arguing now for a belief in the logical alternative that completely lacks any supporting evidence, and against the logical alternative built around the existence of all the supporting evidence.

In the end, that doesn't sound like sound reasoning does it? The proper use of scepticism surely is just to discover unexplored alternatives - gaps in our current explanatory beliefs - and not to simply disbelieve our beliefs.

So mild suffering sucks only relatively and not - per your original statement - absolutely?

And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure?

Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all?

It can only be if you take some essentialist approach to suffering that you could object to these logical consequences.

A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection".

it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this. — darthbarracuda

Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?

Do you see your problem yet?

It's wrong to say that vegetarianism can only be arrived at by romantic thinking. — darthbarracuda

That's why I didn't say it. Instead I highlighted two ways people approach the natural world, and thus the question of the good.

My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.

So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result.

Darth, it's not easy when you pretend you said something else....

Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book. — darthbarracuda

??? The question was what romantic connection could explain Nazi vegetarianism.

You asked what the connection could be. I said notions of purity. So your rant aside, I take it you agree about that then.

Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book. — darthbarracuda

In a word, spiritual purity.

Romanticism boils down to the complaint that the modern technological mode of existence is soul-less and impure. It is dirty, messy, disgusting, unclean, ugly and joyless.

So Romanticism inspired a particular kind of back to nature organicism and back to the past Volkisch-ness or rural community lifestyle.

Of course early Romanticism had a lot of overlap with the Humanism arising out of the enlightenment. But Humanism was anti-theistic and socially optimistic. It was forward looking and celebrated the modern possibilities for human growth, personal freedom and the triumph of rationality.

Evolutionary theory also plays into it because it showed that humans were animals and so raised questions for both the rationalists and the irrationalists (the sentiment driven romantics) in terms of how animals ought to be treated.

Anyway, the association between vegetarianism and romanticism is well known.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_Romanticism

Just as is that between Nazism and romanticism.....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lkisch_movement

So on the one hand there is a rationalist version of back to nature that arises from the rejection of theistic world views and a proper scientific, ecological and evolutionary, understanding of life. This views does not seek spiritual purity as its ultimate good. Instead it is more likely to celebrate the messy and confused imperfections of existence. Life is a balance, a negotiation, full of dynamism and passing variety.

Then there is this other view of back to nature that unites the romantics, Nazis and vegetarians. Purity is the ultimate good. Hence the sentimentality about children, bloodlines, untouched nature, medieval peasantry, animal innocence, etc.

An obssession with purity allows the rationalisation of extreme or absolute positions. That's how the Nazis could justify their concentration camps. That's how vegans can justify their own non-negotiable beliefs. If purity is the good, it is rational to argue imperfection should be eliminated by any means necessary.

But if your view of nature is instead essentially stochastic, then there will always be variety and imperfection. The good is now always about a global dynamical balance that constrains existence in a statistical fashion yet is also creatively sloppy, still fruitfully disorganised and playful at the margins.

To me all your claims about what nature has in mind, which was the phrasing you used at the start of this thread, are about what you have in mind, which you ascribe to natural principle because of your belief-system, which is your own choice within a culturally, historically determined set of 'constraints', which was in turn originally set in motion by our 'natures'. — mcdoodle

It is always going to be the case that we model the world to the best of our abilities. I haven't claimed absolute knowledge in some thing-in-itself fashion. So your epistemological argument is moot.

That leaves the validity of my claims. And they are based on modern science. So well based - as good as it gets when it comes to inquiry into nature.

I have consistently pointed out that I am limiting morality to minds, and thus it cannot be transcendent.

So if we're talking about value, then I am arguing that it is immanent in minds. — darthbarracuda

Yep. You are employing a dualistic ontology and you don't see that as a problem.

So once again you are thrusting practical applied ethics into theoretical normative ethics. Stop doing that. — darthbarracuda

:-}

Nietzsche would have fallen under this vague "romanticism" term, yet he was vehemently opposed to nationalism. And Peirce, your philosophy-Jesus, was a womanizer and eccentric douche. I can cherry pick too! — darthbarracuda

Calling Peirce a womaniser is a bit strong. That charge says more about the uptight community within which he lived. And he was an eccentric douche to the degree that many of the mathematically brilliant can have an autistic streak that makes them somewhat unfit for the regular world.

But fire away. If you want to draw some kind of conclusion about the value of philosophical arguments based on the moral character of their originators, then amuse me.

What exactly do you take transcendental to mean, if not all-encompassing and universal throughout nature? — darthbarracuda

Err, if it pervades nature, that makes it immanent. And immanence is opposed to transcendent, not transcendental, in this context.

Focus on causality. We are talking about the reasons things are the way they ought to be. We are talking about the origins of the shaping constraints, the lawful regularities.

To say that formal and final causes act from outside the realm of material and efficient cause - as Plato did, and as Western religions do - is to claim transcendent origins.

Immanence - as argued by Anaximander, Aristotle and other organicists - is about self-organising materiality. The formal and final causes of being arise within the world itself.

I'm saying there appear to be brute experiences, or transparent experiences. You're saying we can deconstruct them, and show their origins, and somehow this changes our perspective on things. It's akin to me saying there is the color green, and then you saying green is just blue and yellow mixed together, and there "is no green". There's green right there in front of your face! The origins of the color green doesn't matter in this case. — darthbarracuda

First, I would be more likely to talk about electromagnetic radiation and opponent channel processing if I were deconstructing qualia in terms of physicalism.

And then the phenomenological fact that green can be mixed from yellow and blue paint ought to tell you that your experience is not actually brute at this level even. It ought to raise the question of why you can't phenomenologically mix two paints to arrive at red, yellow and blue? Or why the rule for mixing light is different in that now it is yellow that is composite and green that is primary.

Woo. This phenomenological shape-shifting really ought to bother you. And it's right in front of your face - if you ever open your eyes and mind.

Once again you are arguing that what we have done (historicity) and what we are currently doing constitutes what we ought to do. Just because we murder animals doesn't mean we should murder animals. Just because we've made it this far doesn't mean we should continue. — darthbarracuda

I'm sure no matter how many of thousands of times I correct you, it won't make a difference.

The argument is that history proves a state of constraint right - as the best reflection of that history. But then constraints, by their very nature, are permissive and even positively enabling of degrees of freedom. Part of the deal is that they set the degree of disagreement or novelty it is useful to see. And even that is itself subject to the principle of evolvability.

With living systems, the constraints can include information about when to stick with the rules, when to break away and experiment. Animals under stress are designed to increase the mutation rates and so make possible greater than usual adaptive changes.

If you want to make an argument for veganism, no problems. Others are making an argument for paleolithic diets.

My argument already endorses a degree of experimentation of any kind. Let society suck it and see. If there is collective social merit in not eating animals, expect your wishes to come true eventually.

Harm is pervasive and impossible to get rid of. But this need not constrain our ability to think of what could be the case. — darthbarracuda

Sure, we can talk about fictional worlds. But fictional worlds would have fictional moralities. So there doesn't seem a lot of point in wasting too much time on what can't be changed.

Again, your antinatalism might lead you to argue for the wiping out of all life with an integrative nervous system - the minimal qualification for sentience. Leave reality to jellyfish, daffodils and bacteria. But as I have pointed out, you won't in practice beat life so easily. Antinatalism is always going to lose as it only takes a couple of sneaky breeders to slip your net.

So what? What if you found yourself in the Holocaust? I'm sure you'd wish everyone else would adopt the principles I am advocating. — darthbarracuda

One could always wish. But given that is not the way reality works, we need instead to focus on more practical responses to the threat of nasty demises.

Godwin's law not withstanding, aren't you at all troubled by the familiar debating point that Hitler was a vegetarian, Himmler wanted to ban hunting? The same pervasive Romanticism that justified their Nazi racism, justified their anti-specieism.

There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany[1] among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.[2] Many Nazi leaders, including Hitler and Hermann Göring, were supporters of animal rights and conservation. Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime.[3]

Heinrich Himmler made an effort to ban the hunting of animals.[4] Göring was a professed animal lover and conservationist,[5] who, on instructions from Hitler, committed Germans who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. In his private diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of the Jewish and Christian religions in large part stemmed from the ethical distinction these faiths drew between the value of humans and the value of other animals; Goebbels also mentions that Hitler planned to ban slaughterhouses in the German Reich following the conclusion of World War II.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_Nazi_Germany

No scientist has told me to shut up and calculate, though I've discussed these things with some. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's actually a famous line. You know that, don't you?

How do you know that the quantum vacuum is three dimensional? — Metaphysician Undercover

We know that our vacuum is both quantum and three dimensional. And these facts may well be directly connected. That would be a hope for a Theory of Everything. And indeed, dissipative structure arguments are being used to explain why three dimensions are optimally balanced. But its still work in progress to say that is the connection.

I see a difference between relative and absolute, and both relative and absolute things are real. — Metaphysician Undercover

In my book, absolutes represent limits and so are by definition unreal in being where reality ceases to be the case. And that's why reality always needs two complementary limits to give it somewhere to actually be - the somewhere that is within complementary bounds.

Nah, I do not think there is much to do except whine metaphysically, so that I do. — schopenhauer1

It's your life. But you seem to expect me to take it seriously.

...they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.' — Wayfarer

That is certainly the problem for those who are seeking "the particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world".

But as a structuralist - one who sees reality as the product of formal constraints on free possibility - one would point to gauge symmetry for example as a rather absolute reason why we have particular particles as particular excitations of particular fields.

It is a mathematical impossibility for there not to be an electron or a quark with their particular spin characteristics if the possibility of spin cannot be eliminated from the world.

So Albert is talking about the lack of an absolute substantial base from which to build upwards. However the Peircean argument in particular sees "stuff" emerging due to top-down formal and final causation. In metaphysics currently, you would call it ontic structural realism.

The fact that we NEED positive psychology means that we must somehow work to achieve it..more stress to lay on the individual..more burden. Whey we need someone to live so they can go through your "good habits and manners" regimen is not explained other than it is the next best thing once born.. which is at that point simply a band-aid not a remedy. Since there is no remedy, why even provide the burden? Because the group "wants" it? And why abide what the "group" wants? — schopenhauer1

We are back into adolescent whinging then?

Life's too hard to even get out bed in the morning. Everyone is always bugging you about chores you need to do.

The system, just because it is involved in your development does not mean one must like it. It is not an inevitable pairing, simply a truism that society and the individual cannot be separated.. it does not NEED to be a mutual admiration society though (no pun intended). — schopenhauer1

The social system we have in fact requires your dissent. That is part of the pairing. There is no point giving people the power of choice if they never bloody exercise it.

But as usual, it is about balance. It would be a little crazy to remain in a position where you seem to find everything about your social circumstances a burden. If your dissent is that strong, do something more than whinge metaphysically.

You're the one accusing me of the naturalistic fallacy?

And I already explained how I am an anti-realist, so I don't think there is any transcendental value actually out there, — darthbarracuda

Yep. As I say, you are appealing to trancendental values in talking about pleasure, pain and empathy in the dualistically disconnected fashion that you do.

But this would require me to systematically ignore the important bits: feeling, downgrading it to some signal and nothing more. — darthbarracuda

You forget that semiotics is about meaningful signs - there is interpretance built in. We form signs so we can respond with habits.

And then those sign relations are hierarchically open ended or recursive. Creating a robust layer of wise habits is what allows the further thing of intelligent variety.

We can ignore the suffering of going to the gym by focusing on the longer term benefit of getting fit. And after a while, the pain of the gym becomes a pleasure. We suffer when we can't go.

So as a model of feelings (and habits), semiotics is hardly downgrading feelings to signs. It is opening feelings - as just signs - to more sophisticated worlds of meaning. It is doing the very thing of allowing you to care about abstractions like "world hunger" or "specieism".

Doing otherwise reminds me of nationalism - you are proud of the country, not of the people that make up the country. — darthbarracuda

This is just you being wedded to concrete thinking like any good reductionist.

Can one be proud of a nation that can't produce individuals you would be proud of? It might be possible - where they make you stand around the flag every morning and sing some ancestral anthem - but we would hardly call it rational.

In any case, I'm a prioritarian and contingent-sufficientarian. — darthbarracuda

Jeez. How many -isms do you need to establish your moral identity?

Well, let's say I give up my position and go behind you. Are you now obligated to give up your spot to me? — darthbarracuda

So are you meaning to confirm my point that harm can only be mutually minimised and never in practice eliminated? Moral organisation consists of collectively targeting its minimisation.

In the real world us queuers make complex judgments. If someone's needs are visibly greater, we may indeed let them jump ahead, in hope that we live in a world where that behaviour is a norm, and in the belief that our example will indeed be paid forward. But also we resist queue-jumpers in the knowledge that it is quite natural for people to cheat to the extent they can get away with it. So game theory - a balancing of conflicting impulses by the third thing of an optimisation principle - gets applied in real life.

However, in everyday life we often do give up our spots for those who really need it. A man with a broken finger really ought to give up his spot in line for another man suffering from a heart attack. There's priority in effect here. — darthbarracuda

It is everyday life that matters. My complaint is that when you are challenged by exactly this kind of proximity principle, you start talking about finding yourself dying slowly in a motorway pile up or the existential horror of the Holocaust.

It's a good thing we're not doing metaphysics, then. We're doing (meta-)ethics. It already presumes an un-removable manifest image of man, one of Selves, Qualia, and Free Will. — darthbarracuda

So it is metaphysics. But your metaphysics makes different presumptions than mine.

The problem is that unlike non-feeling/thinking things, humans (at the least) have subjective "what it's like" minds. The fact is, when we are born, we are subjected to harms and suffering. This is felt on an individual level despite the fact that we are shaped and shape alike our social group. In fact, the social group dynamic does nothing to mitigate individual feelings of pain and harmful phenomena. That is what your system ignores- the individual "what it's like" experience of actually feeling the pain or harm. — schopenhauer1

You are ignoring the fact that an introspective level of awareness is based on the semiotic mechanism of grammatic speech. Self-consciousness is a socialised habit and not a genetic endowment.

And so all the problems of personal experience can only find their logic and their repair within that ontic framework - as positive psychology, for instance, realises.

Now we are biological selves too. That is part of the deal. And that is why we also try to solve our "mental problems" using drugs or other treatments aimed at our biological capacity to feel.

So I hardly deny anything, I take it all into account. And from there, the answers flow systematically.

Pain and suffering can be more biological or more social in origin. If you have a broken leg, take these pain-killers. If you have a broken heart, find a new partner.

You can't hope to fix anything if you don't have a clear view of how it works.

And if you are a pessimist or antinatalist, your problem is your relationship with society in general. You don't fit it, and it doesn't fit you. One of you is going to have to change. And in my systems view, in fact both sides have to be capable of mutual change as each side is the other's reflection.

It is just that the majority view, the wider social scale, is most naturally going to represent "the good" - at least historically, in terms of what has worked in the past that led up to the present.

New ideas can come along. They do all the time. And at an increasing rate because we live in a society that now encourages a degree of change that I would say is - ecologically - over-exuberant.

But a high degree of mutation does mean a lot of failed experiments. There are masses of social casualities - which is fine in social ecosystems like high tech start-ups where vast flows of capital underwrite youthful resilience. People can crash and immediately get up again. But socially, the other side of the coin is that we also wind up with a permanent underclass subsisting on minimal capital investment.

It is not that hard to understand our current culture in terms of natural imperatives, is it? And from there, start arguing for changes that would improve the general lot.

But ultimately it ends in nothing. — Wayfarer

The quantum vacuum is hardly nothing. It might be cold, flat and extremely featureless, but it is still a sizzle of quantum fluctuations spread out in a three dimensional vastness of cosmic proportions. It is an eternal something.

Well, I think there is a problem here, because "good" is qualitative, and we cannot measure any quality unless we know what it actually is that we are measuring. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's why I don't defend a notion of the "good". This thread shows that folk can't in fact define it except in terms of other more measurable things.

So, with respect to "entropy", how do you propose that we measure this if we do not know what it actually is? — Metaphysician Undercover

We know what it is instrumentally or operationally, like all good physicalist concepts.

What is matter, energy, time or space? In the end, we can only pop these terms into our equations as placemarkers for types of observations we know how to make.

And the reason why entropy (or information) has come to the fore is that it is our most universal way of measuring anything.

Entropy can be defined both in terms of material degrees of freedom and message uncertainty. The information theoretic approach has unified the physical and mental because there is just one unit that can measure reality quantumly either in terms of "what exists" or in terms of "what we can say".

Nowadays, we talk about matter, energy, time and space in fundamentally thermal terms. Hot = curved = dense = fast. Cold = flat = empty = slow. So cosmology is understood in terms of entropy and dissipative structure.

Likewise biology and neuroscience are becoming branches of thermodynamics. They now base themselves openly on dissipative principles.

So it is simply the case that our best model of reality is becoming so generic that it is losing all the particularity that might make it feel more intuitive. Complete abstraction might work, but it can't really be pictured.

I know you don't like that idea - you continue to believe that it is instead a symptom of explanations going wrong. However it is why scientists in the end are right to get exasperated and tell you to shut up and calculate. Abstraction that works is the best we get.

Of course, that is how the Platonic Good arose as a notion. It was an early attempt to cash in on the success of mathematical strength abstraction.

However - unlike entropy - it wasn't defined in terms of a real world measurement. That is why we have Darth proposing his system of wholly subjective and personal measurement.

The notion of the Good does feel right in some way, but folk can only offer hazy objective definitions in terms of flourishing or such like. We can see the Good has something to do with adaptive resilience and healthy growth - real world facts that we could measure using rulers and clocks. We could time how long a system persists when prodded or disturbed. We can measure how much bigger it is getting or how far its extends its relational reach.

So it is not impossible to define the Good in scientifically objective or measurable fashion. And indeed complexity theorists use entropic notions like free energy and mutual information to do just that when talking about societies or brains these days.

The alternative is, we reach a stage where the transcendent is discovered or realised. — Wayfarer

Well, that's not going to be an empirical discovery, is it? And I've argued why it is not a rational discovery either.

For you the 'final cause' appears to be 'dissipation' - things exist only to dissipate energy, or return to a state of maximum entropy. From my perspective, that seems like nihilism. Perhaps you might explain where I'm misunderstanding this? — Wayfarer

Dissipation might be final cause. But dissipative structure is then its formal cause. To achieve dissipation, there must be negentropic organisation that gets you there.

Hence this is why the Cosmos has its laws and other kinds of structure. Regulation has to emerge to make dis-ordering even a concrete possibility.

So it is not exactly nihilism to say that social organisation is necessary as dissipative structure. We have to be organised because there's a job we are expected to do.

No, I'm not, because pleasure is inherently valuable to whoever is experiencing it. Like I said in the OP, humans are value machines. They create value. — darthbarracuda

That's the naturalistic fallacy. Just because pleasure is what a machine creates as its value, doesn't mean that pleasure is transcendentally good.

Of course, you are now using language more like my own - a mechanistic naturalism - and so that reveals the fallacy of the naturalistic fallacy. It is a view of nature which presumes transcendent causes and so there is always something floating off into the distance as "not part of the material system".

Just switch from talking about pleasure as qualia and start talking about it as a biological sign - a semiotic mechanism - and you will have arrived at my kind of pan-semiotic naturalism.

But we must make sure that we focus on the constituents of the social group, not the social group as an object itself. — darthbarracuda

No. We must focus on both by focusing on the mutuality of their relationship.

In systems theory, parts construct the whole and the whole shapes its (re)constructing parts. So the focus is on the primary dynamic that drives the self-organisation.

Sorry, but it is a fundmentally complex model of causality. And one has to focus on the irreduciably triadic nature of that holism.

No, it is not enlightened self-interest. I don't help people because they will help me. I help people because that's what they need. — darthbarracuda

So there is no payback at all?

The "Platinum Rule" - i.e. do not harm others and do not manipulate others. — darthbarracuda

This sounds rather disengaged from life. But how do you define harm and manipulation? Are you going to recognise grades and distinctions? Or as usual, are you treating them as qualitative absolutes?

If we are standing in a queue, and I am behind you with the need to get to the front, are you going to "harm" me by not stepping aside? Are you going to "manipulate" me by keeping your back firmly turned and ignoring my plight?

So sure, normal society puts bounds on individuals and their needs for the collective good. And that defines things like harm or manipulation in grounded practical fashion. You know what to do in that regard by becoming a properly engaged member of that society.

But again we are back to your kind of unplaced and scaleless view of morality where there is none of the relativity that comes from relating. The "good" congeals into a mentalistic and immutable substance. It is not the kind of adaptive dynamical principle that lies at the heart of my naturalism.

And in doing this you ignore that pleasure, pain, and empathy are immediately accessible - you reduce them away and pretend they don't exist. — darthbarracuda

I say they don't "exist" in the way you presume they exist - as dualistic substance.

Instead they are part of a dynamical system of sign and interpretance. There is stability in the development of a hierarchy of interpretive habits, and yet still plasticity in a capacity for novelty and experiment within that system of established constraints.

So in this process view, you get both persistence due to habits, and adaptivity due to spontaneity, co-existing in the same world.

In your actually reductionist view of ontology, you can never get these to complementary aspects of being in the same room. In reducing reality to material being, you create the eternal mystery of the mentalistic.

For example, you have to introduce the homuncular self that experience its experiences. Pleasure, pain and empathy now become qualia - substantial "mental" properties. And you even start appealing to "me" as a fellow homunculus doing the same thing.

It's a familar way of reducing reality - to matter and mind. But we all know that it doesn't work out in the end. Dualism is good for a while, but in the long-run, it is a philosophical blind alley.

The main point I was making is that just as a ball's propensity to roll down a hill can't tell us what's good for the ball, why would our propensity with respect to entropy tell us what's good for us? — Michael

I had already explained that in posts at the start of the thread and then re-explained it to you - and you continue to talk past that. To repeat once more....

When you follow the story of thermodynamics through to the level of complexity represented by a social system, you can see that its fundamental dissipative dynamic can best be described in terms of competition and cooperation. And thus you can see why a basic moral precept, like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", makes natural sense. It encodes a natural organising balance.

I agree with apo's eco-outlook but from a different base altogether. I think naturalism as a basis for ethics is a metaphor/analogy which has a sort of virtue theory lurking in it; that naturalism in itself implies nothing in the way of the good, because nature did not originally have anything in mind. — mcdoodle

But then if you don't accept that our biology and sociology expresses natural principles, then that seems to leave you with only the options that either whatever we do (biologically and socially) is thus arbitrary - it lacks any rational support - or that this support must come from some other (transcendent) source.

So we are back to creating gods, Platonic goods, or whatever.

If you want to reject my naturalism, you have to be able to point to the alternative basis you would then embrace. Otherwise that rejection is simply in bad faith.

Note that my naturalism is explicit in spelling out the role of individual spontaneity and creativity. It is part of the dynamic that there is a fostering of individual competition within the globally co-operative social context.

A society wants to produce the right kind of people. And automatons aren't that useful it turns out.

But is entropification a real regularity, or is it just a function of the way that human beings interpret the properties of a given object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I wouldn't get too hung up on what entropy "actually is". Like the notions of force or energy before it, the more we can construct a useful system of measuring reality, the further away from any concrete notion of reality we are going to get. In modelling, our analytic signs of reality replace the reality we thought we believed in - our synthetic intuitions due to psychological "direct experience".

So you either go with Kant and Peirce here, or you don't. And entropy thinking is way of conceiving of reality that is demonstrably more general or abstracted, less particular and concrete, than what it replaces. In the end, we only know that it pragmatically works.

Another explanation (from Google's define:behaviour) includes "the way in which a machine or natural phenomenon works or functions.". — Michael

So you are denying that the primary definition is about intentional action within a social context context?

The fact that you complain when I use psychological-sounding concepts, then use them yourself without even admitting that is what you are doing, shows you really aren't willing to think this through.

Get back to me when you can account for physical events without talking about the forces that particles feel, or the laws they obey. Demonstrate that there is a fully un-psychological language available to us.

"Behave" isn't a psychological term, so I don't understand this. — Michael

Not sure where you get your definitions from. :)

behave
bɪˈheɪv/Submit
verb

1. act or conduct oneself in a specified way, especially towards others.
"he always behaved like a gentleman"
synonyms: conduct oneself, act, acquit oneself, bear oneself, carry oneself; More

2. conduct oneself in accordance with the accepted norms of a society or group.
"‘Just behave, Tom,’ he said"
synonyms: act correctly, act properly, conduct oneself well, act in a polite way, show good manners, mind one's manners, mind one's Ps and Qs;

And once again I have to explain to you how I am a moral anti-realist. There is no "Good", there are only goods spread out across a population and abstracted as a "Good" in virtue of the basic triad. — darthbarracuda

Yet you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" in claiming that because pleasure is what is, then pleasure is an ought.

And so ethics involves the systematic distribution of care across a population. — darthbarracuda

As I keep saying.

Apo said he recognized pleasure as a mug of beer - but this is a shallow misrepresentation of what pleasure is. — darthbarracuda

Or a sarcastic one.

So like I said, the only thing that makes chocolate and sugar a long-time bad habit is that it will diminish the welfare of the individual. That is invariably what ethics is about: person welfare. Any other conception leads the train off the rails. — darthbarracuda

And so you continue to agree with what you claim to disagree with.

Ethics is about the flourishing of the social group. It is about caring about others in ways that creates reciprocal benefits. And that is a tricky balancing act because - as game theory can spell out mathematically - the "right balance" has to involve the possibility of selfishness too.

We can care about the suffering of others, but then reality has to come into play - rational principles like proximity which you so strenuously want to deny.

It makes more sense for me to care about my immediate family, my immediate community, than to worry about the fate of those so distant as not to have any reciprocal consequences. My starving or sick child has to matter more than some random starving or sick child in Syria or Somalia. So I might give a little money to the Red Cross, but would sell my house to save my child.

So on the one hand, you accept that ethics is about enlightened self-interest - the mutuality and reciprocality that is the definition of social organisation. But on the other, you transmute these rational goods - the secrets of successful organisation - into transcendent goods.

You talk dualistically about biologically-evolved feelings, such as pleasure, pain and empathy, as if they were Platonic abstracta. You treat the qualia as things in themselves - ineffable properties of sentience - rather than biological signals with pragmatic meaning. And in doing this, you ignore all the spatiotemporal complexity of the real world in which social organisation must operate to instead impose a scaleless notion of suffering that floats Platonically above the world we have to describe.

You just ignore proximity arguments, or any kind of complexity really. And you claim to be a moral anti-realist and yet you claim transcendental reality for suffering. Are you starting to see how it doesn't add up?

A physical law is just a proposed description of how things have behaved (and presumably will continue to behave). — Michael

So why do inanimate things now "behave". Why do you find yourself continually using psychological terms to describe what you appear to believe are non-psychological causes? When do we get down to your bare naked description of physical causality in such a way we are explaining and not just "describing by psychic analogies we believe to be fundamentally wrong/fundamentally question-begging"?