Perhaps the objective versus subjective dichotomy is sort of missing the point, or is a misleading line of inquiry. — jorndoe

I would say that moral philosophy clings to that dichotomy as otherwise it pretty much lacks a point. If morality is reduced to simple social pragmatics, then the only real issues are around effective implementation - social, political and economic science.

So moral philosophy needs to stick to a sharply dualistic objective/subjective division to continue to have something to argue about academically.

The objectivists and subjectivists can fight like cats and dogs and yet still want that very thing of the unresolved duality which is what will best preserve their tenure.

However, morals are not mere matters of arbitrary, ad hoc opinion, are not mere whims of the moment; there are common/shared (involuntary) aspects of life, agreements, that render morals objective-like.

Yet, it seems that reducing morals to self-interest is the most commonly accepted justification, or understanding, thereof, like The Golden Rule, for example. — jorndoe

The "objective" part here is that which can be boiled down to some necessary principle. So it is quite right that a lot of what is considered morality is just customary variety - local differences that make no particular difference.

Should you wear a tie or not? Should you squash a spider or not? Should you eat pork or not?

Subjectively it can seem to matter for customary reasons, but objectively we can see that it doesn't matter - as tacitly we feel we are already on the track of some deeper principle which makes these distinctions simply accidental details.

So what does morality boil down to. It boils down to the dynamic, the balance, that makes for a flourishing society. That is the general goal that morality encodes - and must do naturally, inevitably, just because societies only persist as systems if they are fit in this fashion.

The Golden Rule is classic because it gets right down to the basic dynamic - the one of local competition and global cooperation. It says self-interest is good. And so is collective identity. Thus morality is about striking the balance at which these two tendencies are maximised. You want maximum personal freedom - but within a global context which is stable enough, integrated enough, to underwrite that very freedom.

Doing unto others what you would have them do to you is a neat summary of that essential balancing act.

The ancients wrote about this- thought it was probably limited to the upper class. It is hard to say with any certainty what a peasant thought when he was plowing his fields. Perhaps he had a vague feeling of instrumentality when he saw each day look pretty similar. — schopenhauer1

Yes, the invention of the individual, the invention of democracy, began in Ancient Greece - Socrates in particular - and got rediscovered with the recovery and dissemination of those texts in Europe. All hail the printing press.

So in Ancient Greece, there were thoughts about these things - among the small circle of the privileged class. Not so much among slaves and women. But also, the Greek peasant in the field was a little different just because of the small-holding nature of Greek agriculture. That itself makes for a mentality that is both individualistic and co-operative - socially flexible in a way that grain empires, rice paddy colllectives, and nomad lifestyles are not.

The Greek peasant was the reason for the fearsome "total war" machine of the Hoplite citizen-soldier. Greek individualism meant also the new possibility of men banding together in the name of a common abstraction - the state - to fight to the last person standing in defence of the abstract right to a bit of dirt.

This is the irony of Western civilisation. In enabling people to think of themselves as parts of a larger machine, not a rabble, tiny military forces could conquer vast hordes everywhere they went.

I mention this because it again shows that you have to come back always to the reasonableness that underlies the social contract. The Enlightenment took over the world so quickly because it was a form of social organisation that worked so well.

The West did not win and takeover the planet because it looked inside itself and discovered some superhuman source of will. It won because it empowered the individual to act - as an intelligent and self-interested choice - in an unrestrained collective fashion.

Of course, you will now miss the point and say this machine-like social style is exactly what you are complaining about. But again, I emphasise that when it works, it works precisely because it socially constructs individuals who can think for themselves - and through that, really commit to the collective action which best advances any self-interest.

The more free time, the more we can see the bigger picture of what is going on behind the immediacy of simply reacting to hand-to-mouth needs. — schopenhauer1

But you are not seeing the bigger picture if you don't actually understand the dynamics of the cultural history that produced you.

Modern life did not take away all the usual immediate concerns of life - like a roof over your head, food to fill your belly - so you could fritter your existence away in gaming and complaining. No, your job now is to get on with earning big bucks and consuming - accelerating the fossil fuel entropification of the planet.

Whoops. Yes, that doesn't have to be your job of course. It would be nice if you applied yourself to society's question of what better collective action we should be striving after. That might be a really useful use of the gift of life.

But you get the gist. The fact that you find yourself at a point of cultural history where - like a small circle of Greek aristocrats - you have endless "free time" to contemplate your navel, does not mean you should then waste your time in that fashion.

So if you do indeed find your own personal meaning to life in terms of "striving after the bigger picture", then you have to put in enough effort to make sure you really achieve that. Instrumentality and pessimism just seem like lazy shortcuts to me. They demand the least effort to make sense of the world. Just curl up on the couch and wait to die.

By the way, you can be as smug as you want, — schopenhauer1

What is more smug than to be telling me that I am sadly self-deluding in believing life involves an effort for good reason?

Survival may be both partially socially constructed or biological but it is certainly exists and adds to the absurd state of having to move forward at all despite the knowledge of the situation. — schopenhauer1

The absurdity lies in the new culturally-evolved and rather pointless habit of being able to question what we in fact take for granted.

We are biological creatures with all that naturally entails. It is not absurd in itself but all very reasonable.

But we are also - for a few centuries at least - rationalising animals, socially trained in the art of "giving reasons" to justify our behaviour.

It is useful that we see ourselves as "selves" - individuals who can creatively negotiate an acceptable balance between our private (biological and historical) desires and our public social systems (that exist to sustain our human lives).

And the Enlightenment - as a philosophical break with theistic social traditions - was the advance by which this implicit social contract was itself made explicit within culture. We stepped up another level in being able to debate even the rights and wrongs of this social construction of a "free-willing" selfhood. We could improve on its design as a matter of political choice. And so we had the reforms that empowered individuals to actually have more control over their own lives - the social constraints on their actions now being as abstract as possible in being framed within bills of rights, constitutions and other legal frameworks.

But of course, the very nature of rationality - the sharp construction of choice states - is that for every yes, there must be the possibility of a no. For every go, there must be the counterfactual thought of whoah.

That is not absurd. It is what makes rationality work. To act this way is to also decide not to act that way.

However, as action produces reaction, the Enlightenment did conjure up its own cultural response in Romanticism. If the Enlightenment looked outwards to the social conditions that fostered freewill - the development of a culture of self-hood based on an explicit habit of self-regulation - then that also made concrete its (impractical) "other". People could start to imagine doing the opposite in some way - like acting in unregulated abandon, returning to an animal state of unthinkingness, or ascending to some superman state where the individual became larger than his/her social conditions.

That made for great art. People find fictional worlds entertaining. And Romantic portrayals can even reinforce the Enlightenment's rational choices. The sharpness of the "other" also sharpens what it busily "others". Rationality can also take on its own absurd cultural representations as a consequence - the nerdy engineer with pens and a pocket protector.

So it is not hard to track the origins of romanticism, existentialism and eventually pessimism. The more the average individual human is empowered by improvements in his/her social conditions, so too can become more exaggerated the irrational reaction displayed to that very fact.

The pessimist can now come onto social forums waggling his/her bleeding stumps, complaining of the most absolute personal disempowerment. The pessimist has "discovered" that the whole of life is a fraud - socially conditioned, based on biological imperatives - and so he/she is not going to put up with that any more.

And yet - even worse - the pessimist can't see a point to anything. Abstract away the sustaining social conditions, the natural biological imperatives, and the habit of self-regulating selfhood is left with no meaningful choices to make. All that freewill and now no reasons to act! What a colossal tragedy (or farce)!

The pessimist claims this is all philosophically sound because it is where rationality itself leads. If you keep stepping away from the conditions of life, the conditions of society, you wind up as a knot of thought that is simply saying no because it has discovered it could also be saying yes. And in being this detached from the reasons for saying yes, logic seems now to dictate the choice must be no because yes depends on those reasons.

Instrumentality is simply a line of questioning that has painted itself into a corner. It is no different from Cartesian doubt, solipsism, and other familiar exercises in rationality which overshoot the mark by leaving behind the original grounds for belief that made such questioning meaningful.

Sure, the whole point of the modern, empowered, enlightened, negotiating individual is to be an able-minded questioner of the given. But to overshoot the mark and wind up disempowering their own selves through a questioning regress is obviously silly.

If that is the point you have reached, time to turn back and engage with mundane reality again.

So what do you understand by the term "matter" then? What kind of thing do you believe it to be exactly?

I guess that what causes confusion here the is notion that this 'ur-stuff' is called at the same time 'material' and 'pure potentiality'. Usually, we refer to the 'potential' and the 'actual as opposites and we tend to consider all material stuff actual, not potential (even if they inherently have the potential to become something else). So, in this view, the unstructured primal material cannot be said to be (just) 'pure potentiality'. We might say that it is actually something (something formless) and potentially something else (something structured)? — Πετροκότσυφας

I agree this is difficult conceptually. But the key is not to cling to the notion of "stuff". There is neither structure (ie: form) nor matter in this primal state. Instead, the claim is that both material degrees of freedom and global regulative constraints emerge together in mutual co-dependence (to use the Buddhist term now).

The argument for this is logical. We start with what exists - substantial being. And this substantial being has formal and material cause. It is in some global state of organisation or regulation. And it is also composed of equally definite "stuff". It is made of particles or - in modern physics - local degrees of freedom.

So what are we left with if we reverse the emergence process that could produce this kind of substantial organisation? Well both the formal cause and the material cause must melt back together into an ur-state where neither (definitely) exists, but each potentially could be actualised as a division of the ur-state - a symmetry-breaking of its symmetry.

It's all a bit like trying to imagine the grin of the Cheshire Cat. But it is logical in that it imputes to the primal state exactly that which is known to emerge out of it in complementary fashion. So if the substantial world is definite constraints in interaction with definite degrees of freedom, then the insubstantial origins of this world is the potential for both these things - and therefore beyond any kind of material state, or pre-stuff.

Whatever else, both form and matter are equally dissolved in being returned back to the ur-state. There is nothing ur-material to be unformed, as opposed to in-formed or structured.

It sounds weird but it fits with modern physics. If you are talking quantum field theory, you have the same chicken and egg issue. Which comes first, the excitation or the field? Each reveals the existence of the other. So what then came "before"?

What is everythingness? — darthbarracuda

Are you just going to run round in circles never listening?

We agree nothing can't come from nothing. Which is why I support metaphysical positions which argue existence arises via the constraint of pure potentiality, called variously apeiron, tao, vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, quantum foam, etc, depending on whose metaphysical system it is. And chaotic everythingness is another attempt at a descriptive term for the same idea.

To help you out, this is one of the many other times I've explained the exact same thing to you in detail....

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/15094#Post_15094

There cannot be poetry after Auschwitz. — darthbarracuda

And yet there was - https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jan/11/poetry-after-auschwitz

So you accept that everyday existence is mundane (i.e. dull, unoriginal, repetitive, boring, tedious, annoying...everything I have been saying for the past week or so). A direct contradiction to what you had previously said regarding the "richness" of everyday experience. — darthbarracuda

...and also mildly interesting, occasionally eventful, repetitive in its satisfactions, familiar in its reassurances, etc, etc. Just because something is mild doesn't mean it can't be highly varied.

Being lost in the woods when it's negative ten degrees out and snowing and you have no tent or warm clothes because you barely survived a plane crash in the Siberian tundra. Not a walk in the park, in fact probably a death sentence (just look at Stalingrad - and they even had resources). — darthbarracuda

LOL. Every papercut a potential Holocaust in your hands!

Why don't you just throw me off a skyscrapper and ask me how I really feel about that during my plummet to the ground? Recant yet Apo!

If you had a strong argument, it would be able to deal with the everyday mundanity of existence. You wouldn't need to pile disaster upon disaster.

"Nothing" is incoherent. — darthbarracuda

But how many times have I said that and spelt out the alternative - that constraints emerge to regulate a chaotic everythingness?

I don't see what you're saying here. I agree there are emergent phenomenon, but these nevertheless are dependent upon a more basic ontological level. — darthbarracuda

Isn't that what they say about quantum mechanics? You can't conjure up reality out of pure possibility?

You are wedded to ontic principles that are already defunct by 100 years.

An object isn't just something that we can hold in our hands. Black holes, parasites, staplers and armies are all objects. — darthbarracuda

Glad to know you have such a loose definition of objects. The vaguer your position, the less it can be challenged.

But surely you're not going to limit yourself to the immediately-accessible (Earth). That's just bad science. Unless there's a good reason to believe that humans are as good as information processing can get - in which case the AI dream is a pipe dream. — darthbarracuda

Well there are certainly good reasons to think AI a pipe dream. Just as there are good grounds for saying something about the biophysical constraints on life or intelligence as they would exist everywhere in the Universe.

But I'm not sure why you are making a meal of this. Even a crude measure of complexity - like the integrative capacity represented by a trillion synaptic connections inside the typical skull - would show Homo sap to be at the edge of the envelope.

You can talk about other animals with larger brains, but the encephalisation quotient is what counts to comparative neurobiology in putting us at the top of nature's tree.

And you could say the universe must be full of entities with higher IQs. But we can say if they are in the vicinity, they're not waving back. (Just picking up the occasional country hick for a good probe.)

I think you are looking passed the phenomenon of instrumentality. It is not about the evaluation of parts of your umwelt. That last sentence felt funny to write, but I am going to keep that. — schopenhauer1

Your instrumentality appeals to the issue of there being possibly contrasting points of view. So your argument is that we are divided against our own desires in being self-conscious creatures able to wonder what the hell is the point. And my argument is that check out how most people still live their lives and - even in their apparent self-consciousness - they still seem to show a unity with nature which suggests they deeply share its point of view.

Now I freely admit that how I then cash out this naturalism is itself outrageous. Far more outrageous than existentialism, pessimism, or any other familiiar "life sucks" romantic reaction,

I say life is thermodynamics in action - complexity in pursuit of dissipation. And humans have evolved a mentality that befits that in being the super-entropifiers. We are organised around the idea of being maximally wasteful.

And while you say the problem is that we are self-conscious - we look at the crazy lives we are meant to live and wonder "WTF?" - I reply that we are not yet generally self-conscious of this real living mission. And so we have not - within philosophy - even begun to debate whether it is good, bad or indifferent in some fundamental sense.

I think the answer is important. To the extent we are conscious of the fact that we are burning up the planet with unstoppable neo-liberal zeal, it seems as though automatically it must be a bad thing.

But why? You could take the view that giga-joules of buried decomposed planktonic mass - petroleum - wants to be liberated. So we are doing nature's work as intended. Then you can counter that by the calculation of how much more entropy Homo sap could eventually liberate if it avoids its current reckless crash and burn lifestyle.

So this is an approach to humanity's basic dilemmas that no doubt absolutely everyone finds more distasteful than the everyday cultural familiarity of existential ennui or pessimistic despair. And I can make it even worse from a philosophical viewpoint by showing that it is the inescapable scientific truth of what is happening.

So I can have my extremist fun too. :)

But to get back to your instrumentalism, I would say show me the reason to believe that humanity is not organised around life's general grand entropic goal. There may be discord about society's best rate of burn - go hard out or slow to a steady state - but to burn is the accepted necessity.

Now of course, once you say that, then anti-natalism, suicide, and other ways of bailing out of the whole burn game can come to mind as counter ideas. But again - realistically - for every person that makes a choice to step aside from the fray, any number will rush forward to take their place.

It is unnatural not to burn. Therefore an anti-burn lobby can never get far before being swamped by those still ready and eager.

So yes, you can make a case for a mass voluntary withdrawal from reality's thermodynamic imperative. But it is all rather hypothetical as it won't happen in practice. Thus philosophical energy would be better spent on the practical question of how to ride this entropy train to our best general self-aware advantage? What is the social organisation that can achieve that?

And as is obvious, as I keep saying, we exist with one foot in the biology of our hunter-gather lifestyle past with its steady-state economy, our other foot in the socio-economics of an exponential fossil fuel explosion. So yeah, you've got to expect that to be uncomfortable in ways we have yet to think through adequately.

I don't think you understand how not all axiology or aesthetics is realist in nature. Any value is going to be subjective, depending on the existence of a mind. — darthbarracuda

What I don't "understand" is the dualism this kind of comment relies upon.

I argue from naturalism. So in the end, your talk of "selves" and "experience" has to be a socially constructed delusion - a way of talking that makes sense, and yet in the end, doesn't make sense.

The world of "subjective opinions" - axiology and aesthetics - is clearly real in being culturally constructed in pursuit of naturalistic social goals. A linguistic artifact. To talk about it as if it inhabits some ideal Platonic realm - a realm of the "mind" - is unreal.

Perhaps you're thinking more about moods than brute sensory experience. — darthbarracuda

From a neuroscience perspective, these are just different spatiotemporal scales of adaptation. So they are not fundamentally different.

Faced with this kind of complexity, you of course will immediately seek to reduce things to the simplicities that best fit your style of arguing.

I can't help but wonder that if you got lost in the woods one day and faced a cold winter's night, if you wouldn't reconsider the duality of what I'm saying here. Your metaphysics, no matter what it's validity is, would have very little importance. Again people like to think they are complex, in control of who they are, and powerful, but when faced with the aforementioned scenario they inevitably fall into mania or depression. — darthbarracuda

To claim that such an outcome is inevitable is nuts. Being lost in the woods for a night doesn't even sound traumatic, just embarrassing.

Of course we can be well adapted to our worlds as we have so far experienced them, but then nature can throw down its further surprises and "our sense of mastery will prove an optimistic illusion".

This is true, but that is already factored into a general model of life as an anticipatory system - one that develops habits of coping while retaining a capacity for further learning.

The flaw is that you're explicitly favoring (affirming) this "in-between" between optimism and pessimism, thus making it a quasi-optimism. While if you were completely honest with your assessment it would be utterly neutral. If it's indeed neutral and not worthy of being called "good" or "bad" then there would be no way of evaluating it at all. — darthbarracuda

How can I argue against your monotheistic Pessimism without pointing out that there is the second thing of optimism, and then beyond that, the third thing which is a neutral balance?

So it is not a flaw for my position that there are these further things which your position wants to deny. I am simply pointing to the stages towards a more complex triadic position.

Because happiness, bliss, joy, etc are simply the lack of suffering. Think about it: if you're not suffering, what are feeling (assuming you're conscious). Are you happy? Are you joyful? If you're not happy and not joyful, then you must have something keeping you from feeling this way - thus you are stressed, anxious, panic-ing, suffering, etc. — darthbarracuda

I dunno. I would say instead it is normal to be feeling all these kinds of things at once in some fashion. Life just is rich and varied in that way.

That is why I object to your habit of monotonic exaggeration. I could focus on just one part of my total umwelt at the moment - like a slight achiness in my back - at the expense of others, like a slight sense of satisfaction in my stomach. I could make my back the center of my world (and ouch, now I'm really starting to notice it). Or instead I could be more honest about my phenomenal state and say in fact it is quite naturally mixed at all times. It is neither up, down or even neutral, in any simplistic fashion.

Of course I accept that if I were currently being crushed in a car crash, or I was out of neurobiological equilibrium and in a depressive fugue, then that internal variety might be a lot more one-dimensional.

But if we are talking about typical mental state, then it is better characterised as vague - an awful lot of nothing much in particular.

Emergence from what? poof! existence, ta-da! — darthbarracuda

Is there no evidence in the world of emergence?

Voids can be objects, since we can predicate them. — darthbarracuda

On what exactly - their lack of predicates?

How do you know this? — darthbarracuda

Neuroscience when it comes to measuring information density. Economics when it comes to measuring ecological footprint.

I mean I know this was more tongue-in-cheek than anything but if that's the case then everything is thermodynamics which makes it an empty term — darthbarracuda

Actually I'm serious. And thermodynamics is a rich enough model of causality to unify our notion of the world.

Don't forget that is how metaphysics started - Anaximander's model of existence as the separation of the Apeiron into the hot and the cold. And now cosmological science understands our existence in terms of a Big Bang making the transition to a Heat Death.

On an empirical note, it must carry some weight what people actually regret in terms of the life they have lived. Pessimism is just so one-note in its complaining. But what do people discover about what actually appear to matter?

Here is one such summary for discussion....
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Pick the bones out of that slightly self-contradictory assortment. ;)

Coming from the opposite vein, pessimists are fed up with the system. — darthbarracuda

I'm not saying there isn't a problem with "the system". I'm just saying that a rather more sophisticated analysis is needed than "life sucks".

As Schop1 said elsewhere, there is a kind of "optimistic mafia" installed in society: you WILL be happy!, you WILL love life!, you WILL support your country!, you WILL smile at death!, you WILL suck up your internal struggles, etc — darthbarracuda

That's how things go - polarisation. Pessimism must frame itself in terms of what it is not - optimism. It has to construct this "other" as a mafia to justify its own desire to become a mafia too.

This is what I criticise. You have to exaggerate the strength of your opposition so as to legitimate yourself as its counter. You want to leave bystanders no option but to declare for either Team Optimist ir Team Pessimist. Philosophy then becomes the loser because your slippery-slopism admits to no shades of grey.

From the negative perspective, social optimism is rather similar to fascism - make the perfect happy bubble and get everyone to conform to it, because everyone secretly knows just how fragile happiness is. You can't have unconformers. Which is exactly what you seem to be arguing here. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Optimism as you describe it is fascist and oppressive. Just as is Pessimism as you describe it. Both are totalitarian in standing at their respective extremes.

But of course what I am "exactly arguing" is something else. I am arguing that optimism and pessimism - to the degree they are natural - would exist as the bounding limits which then make possible the variety of all the feelings that lie in-between. So now I would focus on the nature of that balance, that hopefully fruitful balance, that lies in-between.

If you can point out a flaw in this logic, go ahead.

If you don't feel any of the ways pessimists describe us as feeling, please tell us all why and how you are able to accomplish such a great feat. We'd love to know, as would everyone else. — darthbarracuda

You are not really listening. My point has been that feeling bad, feeling good, feeling neutral, are all part of life's rich and varied experience.

So the very idea of "eliminating unhappiness" is nonsensical on its own. The question is really would you want to eliminate "feeling" in some generalised sense? Can you offer a strong philosophical argument at this deeper ontological level?

And I'm not saying that such an argument can't in fact be made. But I am saying this is not the argument that is being attempted here.

This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of particular-favoring nominalism, for particulars are only understandable within a broader general context. — darthbarracuda

Yes, I am against nominalism because it is only "micro-transcendence" in this fashion. To name a particular or an individual is just as much an act of naming (or semiosis) as to name a general or universal. It is to imagine standing outside the thing in question - a horse, a mountain, a whatever - and to know it for what it absolutely is in terms of some wider framing context.

I don't know what this means. Do you have any examples? — darthbarracuda

Are you kidding? Discrete~continuous, chance~necessity, local~global, atom~void, matter~form, body~mind, flux~stasis, vague~crisp ... the standard list is pretty long.

But this begs the question as to why reality is constrained as it is. Which leads us to the conclusion that there is something keeping it all in line, something fundamentally static, that acts as the joints or structure of reality — darthbarracuda

It answers the question in terms of the emergence of a dynamical symmetry state, an equilibrium balance. An equilibrium has emergent stability because it is a state where continuing (microstate)change no longer makes a (macrostate)change.

There is an entire science of (thermo)dynamics now.

I would argue that objects exists everywhere, at any scale, micro to massive. — darthbarracuda

And so do voids.

So yes, that is what happens when you have complementary limits to being coupled then to the freedom for all balances to be struck within those limits.

So if the universe has the possibility to be clumpy and object like, this requires in matching fashion that it has the possibility for empty spaces. Each possibility necessitates the other. And then if this dichotomy is freely expressed over all scales, then you will have objects and voids of every possible size.

Hence the commonness of fractals or scalefree patterns in nature. Nature expresses this principle - of separation and mixing - everywhere we look.

Certainly a human being is not a transcendent component of existence unless you're an idealists, and certainly we aren't "just" numbers that magically turn into matter. We ourselves exist in our own level, dependent but not identical to these other hierarchies. — darthbarracuda

The natural view of humans is that we are peak complexity. And this can be measured directly in terms of entropy production, as should be the case if existence is ruled by the second law of thermodynamics.

So humans - as negentropy - can be reduced to a number such as the number of barrels of petroleum burned per capita, an entropic footprint.

The Universe is composed of objects and voids - or entropy producers and entropy sinks. And humans are measurably the most concentrated forms of intelligence. Or in other words, the most effective local sources of entropy production our corner of the Universe at least has witnessed.

(So if we ask what the subject matter of philosophy essentially is - even if it is only now becoming apparent - then it is thermodynamics. :) )

In any case I have to wonder why you would be opposed to perfection. Indeed Plato, Aristotle, and others all thought that there were the Forms, or the Telos, or whatnot that we ought to strive to instantiate. They wouldn't have looked too kindly on imperfection. And yet here you are being apologetic for the inherent imperfection of nature...why? Why is imperfection acceptable? Why is mediocrity acceptable? Seems to me that tolerating imperfection is a form of apathy, a weakness of the will. An inherent unjustified affirmation of the normal. — darthbarracuda

You are using very emotional language here. My position of course is that the ideal only speaks of the general limits of existence - and by the same token, limits are only approached, never reached. Then furthermore, the general limits of nature always take the form of complementary poles of being. Therefore the true "ideal" state is always one of some kind of balance between any two complementary poles that define being.

You can talk about such dynamical balances as "mediocre" or "imperfect". But that just shows your metaphysics is fundamentally unrealistic. You are not even understanding the message that metaphysics wants to deliver when it comes to the (self)organisation of nature.

We are just going to go around in circles until you can understand the ground of your own arguments. You are presuming that having two poles of being - like pain and pleasure - is "unnatural" as you would want monistically "only pleasure/no pain". But in evolutionary terms, pain and pleasure exist as boundary states. They are there as extremes so psychologically there then exists the great variety of possible states of balance inbetween.

For anything to exist - phenomenologically - there must be the extremes which together allow the spectrum of what then actually is.

And if we are then talking about the ideal state of this lived spectrum, then somewhere about the middle of it - a state of vague contentment - would seem the natural balance.

However then we have to include the fact that this mentality is meant to be adaptive and learning. So now its "ideal form" has to have an element of irritability. It must be a content balance that is suitably easily disturbed and restless so as to be able to respond to a changing environment.

And here too we find that nature strikes just such a balancing act. It trades off the contentment of stable habit with the irritability of restless attention.

And then even beyond this, nature makes this trade-off over a natural life cycle. An immature organism is all irritability, minimal habit. An immature organism is striving so as to learn. Then at the other end of a life - senescence - creative intelligence becomes dominated by passive wisdom. The balance is tipped towards a life of well-adapted routine, an existence of well-established habit.

So what is natural is complexity of this kind. Once we get away from monistic simplicity and start thinking triadically - seeing ontology developmentally as a business of dialectical separation and then hierarchical mixing - then we get the kind of elaboration upon elaboration that starts to resemble the lives we really lead, the world we really exist within.

Because of the focus on transcendence, it seems to stand that the "subject matter" (if that is even applicable) of metaphysics is ultimately outside the domain of experimentation. Experimentation occurs within immanence, where things change and events happen. But the transcendent doesn't change. Events happen, but event does not. Things change, but thing and change itself do not. Because of the lack of change or occurrence in the transcendent, there cannot be any manipulative experimentation in the sense of "taking control of nature", because if we could take control of the transcendent, this would only necessitate the existence of another, true transcendent. — darthbarracuda

Note that metaphysical intelligibility depends on the duo of the (transcendently) general and (immanently) particular. So it is not really any different from scientific reasoning in employing an epistemic method of theory and measurement, or a modelling relation.

So if we talk about the generality of things as "substantial being", then we support such a claim by offering examples of things that seem "measurably" substantial, like a horse or a cup. Our transcendent concepts are empirically argued using examples. They arise as the inductive limits of what seems immanently to be the case.

Where metaphysics goes further is in apply dialectical or dichotomistic reasoning to generality itself. It derives polar pairs of limits to frame its talk about possibility.

So the world seems full of things that either are changing a lot or not changing much if at all. Or the world seems full of things that are accidental happenings, or at least accidental until we discover reasons why they had to have occurred. From that empirical evidence, we can then generalise towards the complementary limits of what might be the case.

We can argue - with logical rigour - that either flux or stasis, either chance or necessity, are the limits of possibility. And in being able to name the bounds of possibility, we are talking about the reality of the transcendent - that is, the limits where reality in fact has gone as far as it can possibly go.

So the transcendent, the abstract, doesn't in fact exist. Or it exists only in the sense of being a limit on immanence.

The secret of metaphysics is thus that it does not just generalise. It generalises in this particular way - dialectically or dichotomistically - to identify the fundamental categories of existence.

Then science has another trick up its sleeve. It turns the empirical into a matter of measurement. It now turns the world into a play of numbers. Transcendence is brought down to the level of the confirming particulars.

If horse or cup now denotes a substantial quality, science turns instances of "horse" or "cup" into acts of quantification. Or more generally, if existence is poised between complementary bounds like chance and necessity, stasis and flux, science is about measuring the position of particular things in terms of the relative distance to those global bounds.

So science is in the business of micro-transcendence. It turns the fine detail of immanent reality into an "externalised" pattern of numbers.

And so generally we are stuck in an immanent reality. But we manufacture a transcendental point of view by establishing bounding limits both "looking upwards" and also "looking downwards". Looking upwards, we see metaphysical generality. Looking downwards, we then turn the micro view into patterns of numbers - digits read off measuring instruments.

So if this is the way metaphysics has worked out - first learning how to look upwards to generality, then downwards to particularity - might not the same apply to all philosophical disciplines?

Either it should. Or else maybe metaphysics is a different game for good reason. And both answers would be uncomfortable for those other philosophical disciplines.

Even these positions that probably strike as both as unnecessarily "troubled" are, in my view, the better, more positive view struggling to be born. — Hoo

I get fed up with pessimism and antinatalism when it becomes just a back-justification for a bad mental habit that produces the very thing it complains about.

If there were some evidence that this "philosophical" tendency is instead the troubled path to a more positive outcome, then fine. Let's hear more about that then.

But if people are going to make general claims about futility, instrumentality and self-delusion - seek to impose their "truths" on my existence - then they better be prepared for a robust argument. They are making it personal.

Maybe it's the contingency of the world he find absurd. It is absurd. "Why is there a here here?" — Hoo

Yeah sure. But that in turn is based on the presumption that contingency is somehow not natural.

So there are three positions here.

At one extreme is the theological/Platonic one where every tiniest thing is a detail that matters. Either God has some point of view about it. Or there is some perfect form mourning the imperfections of its material shadows. Everything counts.

Then the flipside of this perfectionism and necessitarianism is the view that it is all just contingent and meaningless. No one in fact gives a damn so there is nothing to anchor our existence.

Which then leaves the middle course - the naturalist view - that reality is a fruitful interaction of constraints and freedoms. And that makes contingency or spontaneity a natural part of the deal - along the generality of everything in the end being orientated by a sense of purpose.

So when it comes to humans living a life, there are a lot of different things we can be doing that don't in the end make too much difference. And yet also by the same token, there is stuff we really ought to be focused on as that which does make a difference.

So humans can come to believe any of these three conceptual frameworks - and affectively value their lives in that light.

The point I would then make is that the conceptual analysis comes first. Affect is not a reliable guide as to whether your life is indeed futile or ecstatically fulfilling. Instead, how you frame things is how you will seek to feel.

The Christian will expect to feel everything is God's will. The Pessimist will expect every action to be in the end pointless - a grand pretence at caring. Then Naturalism will take the view that life is about a dynamical balance.

So you have to prove your case at the metaphysical level, not simply claim your (socially constructed) feelings are legitimate or authentic.

the affect or feeling I am getting at- that of absurdity — schopenhauer1

Absurd in comparison to what? Is it absurd as living creatures to have the goals that define life? Should I feel it is unnatural to be natural?

Not my problem if your OP is a rambling bleat about the problem that any kind of action - even deliberate inaction - seems to betray a goal state. And you can't have that because you need to support your presumption that all goals are futile.

It cannot be based on studies of the brain because that is only possible via the very perception that he claims does not show things to be anything like what "they really are". — John

There is a rational argument at the base of this. The brain evolves to represent the world in terms of our interests. And so our own interests get baked into our states of perception. We are not in the business of seeing things as they really are, but only as they really matter.

I'm wondering if this can be taken seriously with most people without being dismissed as juvenile or simply a product of post-modern society. — schopenhauer1

Sadly, it just is juvenile. For you to be able to do literally nothing (feed yourself, wipe your arse, turn you over to avoid bedsores) would require others to do everything for you. So you are advocating for a parasitic state where your idleness forces more busyiness on those around you.

Existence is a natural cycle which includes birth and growth as well as decay and death. So life has its own natural logic - one of dynamic adaptation rather that static contemplation - and philosophy should address it on those terms.

Of course philosophy, being dialectic, always will produce the "other". But in being able to talk about what life is not (ie:death), this should only highlight what life is. It then becomes perverse to want to "play dead" before your time is up.

apokrisis — darthbarracuda

Typically I'd say we value personal value over impersonal value anyway so the idea that we ought to kill miserable people for the sake of some abstract impersonal value is a bit convoluted. — darthbarracuda

But don't you routinely extrapolate from the personal to the general in this fashion? It is not the suffering within your own experience that is the issue for you but the impersonal fact that suffering exists. So yes, this is "convoluted". Which is what I thought I had argued.

Do you really believe you have the right to force a future generation to fix what our generation is failing to fix? i.e. instrumentalizing future generations without their consent? — darthbarracuda

I talked of their right to a choice in the matter. So equally they could decide to make their existence as miserable as they like.

But clearly, if it is admitted that suffering exists due to things that can be changed, then the fact we seem to be doing a poor job - your claim, not mine necessarily - doesn't give us the right to take away that opportunity from future generations.

This is also where antinatalism can be a potential gamechanger in this debate. We don't need a procreative population ethics because we don't need to procreate nor have a population to begin with. — darthbarracuda

But it could only be a personal choice not to have kids. And should your partner and family, or even society, have no say at all here? It is not clear you automatically would have this right. And indeed, a society in which its population ceased to breed might be within its right to take a more coercive stance. Or if the cult of antinatalism got to widespread, again a society might want to protect itself against such an antisocial threat.

So to the degree you define this as a personal choice, then this leaves open the ethical issue of what kind of choice does social and biological level organisation in all this?

No, it wouldn't be for their own good, it would be for an abstract impersonal good. Which I also find to be repugnant. — darthbarracuda

But you are giving them the gift of removing their suffering according to you. No amount of pleasure could justify even a paper cut or the risk of a horrible death in a fiery car crash, remember? So it is entirely for their own good.

No, suffering in nature is the affirmation of life without the person suffering consenting to life. It's the body's way of forcing a person to do something, i.e. enslavement, i.e. instrumentality. — darthbarracuda

OK, it gets weird when you talk about personhood as if it could be disembodied. All natural logic breaks down here.

clearly a suicidal person who jumps off a building is suffering, and clearly this is not an affirmation of life nor an affirmation of the value of life, rather the complete opposite. — darthbarracuda

Err yeah. But now we are into a position where suicide is taken to be the right choice and so all sufferers should be assisted off the top of the nearest high rise if they can't do it for themselves.

So either you respect the majority choice or we are into the business of removing that choice because we can't tolerate people being self-deluding and enslaved to their own corporeal bodies.

And no, it's not eugenics, because eugenics is all about finding the perfect, ideal organism, and antinatalism is usually focused on the fact that there are no perfect, ideal organisms. — darthbarracuda

It is eugenics because it shows a fascist intolerance of imperfection. The goal is to eliminate unwanted population traits. And the solution is as final as it gets.

To answer your question, a proponent of the Asymmetry would likely respond by saying that helping miserable people get better, is better than just killing them. — darthbarracuda

Well we would all agree there. But that then admits to the possibility of a socially-organised escape from misery. Which ought to put us straight back into ordinary utilitarian style discussions.

Indeed many symmetry-advocates have outright proclaimed that they deny the Asymmetry despite finding it incredibly appealing. — darthbarracuda

But how can it be appealing if it's bare calculus warrants active subtraction just as much, if not more, than the prevention of addition coupled to natural wastage?

Over time, the asymmetry would only result in a nullity. Whereas the subtraction of miserable people from the population results in a perfectly happy populace. And +1 is clearly better than 0 when it comes to the sums. Not to kill off the miserable while producing as great a population of the happy as possible would be a positive crime, if we take this kind of calculation at its face value.

It's why I think the Asymmetry is so intuitive, it's why I think David Benatar's antinatalistic asymmetry is so intuitive, it's why the mere-addition paradox is so repugnant, etc. We seem to have, regardless of what we consciously argue for, an inherent negative utilitarian-like disposition. — darthbarracuda

Who is this "we"? Personally it strikes me as a PC version of fascist eugenics. Humans are against nature and therefore should be extinguished. Give the planet back to the bugs and fungi.

So yes, we can take a compassionate view about the suffering of others. We can wish for a better world. And feeling inadequate to the task of making it a better world, we can then decide the final solution is to remove the problem by removing the sufferers - antinatalism merely seeming to be the kindest approach to this holocaust against folk having a freedom to choose and act on their own accord.

Do you really believe you have the right to deny a future generation to fix what your generation seems to be failing to fix (and I say "seeming" as the evidence being given is so slight that it is routinely talked up to the skies)?

Perhaps you can re-describe the asymmetry in a way I can follow its intuitive appeal. I still only see that its natural logic demands we start subtracting the miserable immediately for their own good.

That is of course a repugnant idea. But largely because you can't create a happy world in that kind of binary fashion. Talk about happiness as an ideal, as opposed to the ideal of the adaptive balance - some notion of social flow and fit - is where the whole analysis starts to go wrong. It is not even the proper measure of anything here. And so therefore neither is this obsession with pain and suffering.

Suffering isn't the end of the world, just a normal aspect of life. Or to put it another way, it is what it feels like to be pointing towards death instead of life. If you are getting pain that intense, that's your signal you are getting down to your last chance to stay alive.

So suffering - in nature - is affirmation that life is in fact valued. It is the fate better than death. And yet you want to take away the gift of life for untold generations of the unborn! Isn't that PC eugenics?

In a nutshell, the Asymmetry is a population ethics intuition that we must make people happy, but not make happy people (i.e. giving birth to happy people), i.e. the world is made worse by the addition of a miserable person but is not made better by the addition of a happy person (as if the happy person is entirely irrelevant). — darthbarracuda

Not to derail your thread, but why - given this equation - is it not justified to go around killing off all miserable people? (Or equivalently, tanking them up on heroin, giving them lobotomies, or whatever.)

As an asymmetry, it still harbours the symmetry with would be subtraction instead of addition. And subtraction would seem to have the advantage of fixing things right away rather than waiting to make the desired change over time.

Anyway, in terms of your thread, I think "why anything?" is as good an obsession as any.

I think it's hard to to say "Good art is meant to x" — csalisbury

Yep. It is hard to assign it a specific purpose or even a general one. The question becomes why would we even want to separate it out as an aspect of human existence. In a traditional culture, art permeates everything and is something everyone is involved in.

So what I highlighted are two ways that art has been pulled out of the ordinary in modern life - first as a product to consume, and second as a new ground for status games.

So this betokens perhaps meta-art, a new level of self-consciousness that we humans "are creatures characterised by doing art". And in being self-conscious, the note of falseness and artificiality intrudes. Suddenly we also become aware of art that is just unthinking participation in human symbolic culture and then art as something we individually can have control over as consumers and purveyors.

Thus I am right with you regarding Tarkovsky and the skill with which it both unsettles and soothes. It has the subtlest intensity. But I am not saying we can pull even Tarkovsky out as a noble exemplar of what defines good art in some Platonic sense. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that the ability to truly appreciate Tarkovsky would be highly correlated with intelligence and visual imagination. :)

But maybe the idea that "Fine Art" is a balm in Gilead, or maybe it's baloney. — Bitter Crank

Isn't great art meant to make you think? Isn't it meant to unsettle rather than soothe? Isn't it there to stir to action as well as calm the nerves? Isn't it meant to lift us to refined intellectually while, at other times, reduce us to primal intensity?

In other words, art is a cultural tool for extremising the variety in our emotional and intellectual responses. It offers social viewpoints that constrain everyday experience in a way that seems to tap into some aesthetic essence.

That and it is provides something even more important to a social animal - an arena for status display.

Anyone can aspire to money or power these days. But taste and refinement are much rarer commodities precisely because they are invented rather than real. Snobbery is about staying a step ahead of the game in dreaming up new kinds of social distinction.

So art is something to be consumed just because it is fun. We like being pulled in directions that take us out of the ordinary, or extract its essence.

And art is a status game that is especially attractive to those not winning status in more traditional ways, like money and power.

Ok, so prior to symmetry-breaking there must be symmetry? — Metaphysician Undercover

Logically prior at least. The question then becomes what this means in terms of a physical model of time.

If symmetry is the maths and modeling of the real world stasis, then what is the symmetry which is prior to symmetry breaking, other than stasis? — Metaphysician Undercover

I say it becomes a model of vagueness once we shift from talk about what currently exists to how existence itself might develop.

To turn vagueness from a metaphysical to a scientific concept, we need good mathematical formalisation. And symmetry maths becomes useful here because of its rigour. But symmetry maths is not a direct intuitive image of developmental processes (such as symmetry-breaking) as it presents a spatialised and timeless picture of nature. It is nature already gone to equilbrium or stasis.

Models of symmetry-breaking are derived more from physics than pure maths. And so the physics invokes further material features - things that bring in time and energy now - such as "spontaneous fluctuations" and "infinite correlations" that both create a dynamical balance, and cause that balance to be tipped.

So now the task for the cosmological emergentist view is even larger. It is not only time, but space, energy, and their interactions, which must all develop into crisp being as well.

Which is fine because at least it fits with the most recalcitrant physical facts of nature we have yet discovered. Everything boils down to the uncertainty (or vagueness) relation encoded in the triad of Planck constants that scale spacetime, energy density, and lightspeed (or the limit on actual material correlations).

The Planck scale tells us there is a "size" below which any normal talk of spacetime or energy density ceases to be physically meaningful. So like it or not, that ought to be factored into any modern discussion of metaphysics.

I am only proceeding now according to your assumptions. You claimed that time, and change are emergent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well if you were following my argument, you would have to bring in its other side - the emergence of stasis (as encoded in the further notion of space).

Don't you assume symmetry, and isn't symmetry a form of stasis? — Metaphysician Undercover

As I've said, symmetry is a way to model stasis because it is the maths of differences that don't make a difference. And so it is a model of physical equilbrium situations, where there are differences, and they don't make a difference.

Math's problem is that it is timeless and energyless in being basically a spatial or geometric conception of things. So symmetry maths has a static character just due to the way maths is derived. You are risking confusing the stasis of the method with the stasis (and flux) of the world the method is used to model.

You are the one who takes stasis for granted, — Metaphysician Undercover

Hardly. I've said it is emergent as an equilibrium state - flux arriving at its own inherent limitations. And "time" speaks to the time it takes to run down a gradient of symmetry-breaking. Time emerges from the fact that such a change can't be instant when it comes to our Universe.

It is, generally speaking, I was just simplifying for the sake of discussion. — Aaron R

I appreciate that you even mentioned it. Treat my post as mostly a trigger for my own self-clarification.

What I was trying to get at it is that since the mind-conceived 'mind-independent world' is always, obviously, conceived; then it is always conceptually articulated. — John

Well that is different in focusing on the epistemic angle rather than the ontic. And pansemiosis is an ontic claim in saying, essentially, that epistemology becomes ontology here. The structure of the modelling relation we have with the world (what you are talking about) is in fact the structure by which the Universe also "knows things" - that is knows things like what its laws say about how its parts ought to be behaving in conformance with developed habit.

So what I would say in reply here is that while we need - epistemically - to be aware that the "mind-independent world" is in fact a free creation of the mind, just an idea, it is also true that the "mind" is also a construction of this kind. It is also "just an idea" we hold to explain things.

So both the world and the self that is imagined as its observer are articulated concepts. Together they form the very epistemic relation, the sign relation, which is what "we" then claim to believe in as our "objective truth".

What we can't get beyond is the need for a conceptually articulated view in general. And talk about the mind vs the world is what that articulation looks like.

Of course there is, we must imagine, 'something' independently of human being. — John

But strictly, we consider reality to start exactly where imagination fails. Imagination makes experience depend on "us". We can imagine flying for instance. So it is when experience comes to depend on something other than "us" that we can experientially say, well this is not "us" now. And let's call this other thing mind-independent reality.

If something is conceptualizable, then it is articulated in the same, or an isomorphic, manner as concepts are, i.e. logically. So, it seems that we are committed to thinking there is a logos in nature independently of human being. — John

Now we are back to ontic commitments. And the question is whether the structure of thought and world are the same in some way that is exactly as we conceive it, or whether - because we know we are manifesting an image - in fact it still remains likely that we are just projecting our articulate concepts.

And my own point about self and world as equally conceptual at root, should point towards the latter, in fact. There is now even less reason for the workings of our minds to be true to the thing-in-itself.

This is probably surprising, but it is already basic to psychological science. The brain is not there to re-present reality but to ignore it as much as possible. Attention and habit are filters set up to limit our physical connection to the world (so as to achieve the separation which constitutes the modelling relation's epistemic cut). Being a mind is all about constructing some minimal symbolic encoding that simply has the job of leaving us effective physical actors. Like DNA's relation to the metabolism it models, the contents of experience must be essentially unrealistic to be effective as semiosis.

If you want people to stop at road junctions, you put the stop sign to one side rather than erecting a physical barrier in the middle of the road. Or at least that is the simple and cost-effective way to co-ordinate driving behaviour. The stop sign looks nothing like a physical barrier. It doesn't represent the world. Yet as a symbol, it articulates a concept about how the world "ought to be".

So this is very tricky stuff. We have every reason to be suspicious of every articulate conception as their whole point is not to be true in some veridical "thing-in-itself" sense. That is not even the ambition. The ambition is to be pragmatically effective. And that is achieved by a capacity to leave just about everything material out of the concepts. Classic reductionism to theory and measurement in other words.

However then - having properly understood this psychological apparatus, this epistemic truth - that is the structure of the modelling relation which pansemiosis would project onto our imaginings of reality. The thing-in-itself has the form of wanting to self-simplify in terms of concepts like particles or waves ruled by dynamical laws of motion, for instance.

People always complain that we look at reality but then talk about the abstracta that aren't really there. We end up treating a logos as the essence of the real (while the actual physical stuff is reduced to mere appearance).

Pansemiosis - in transferring the psychological account into the space of cosmological accounts - gives us a formal way of accounting for just this. It says, nope, logos really is what is most real here. The thing-in-itself is not just some bunch of stuff, a state of affairs. It does boil down to an encoding relation where there is a cosmic purpose expressing the desire to produce the simplest definite actions.

Anything might be quantumly possible. But semiotically, existence arises due to the collapse of all this potential being to some historic collection of binary-framed choices. Was the electron spin-up or spin-down all along? Who can know. But history remembers some now fixed answer.

Yes, that's a good example, actually. — Terrapin Station

If you like that, then I would highly recommend Salthe's two books on hierarchy theory - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution.

Even in this last post, I just can't make sense of "You are trying to fit things into a view of existence that lacks spatiotemporal scale" — Terrapin Station

Again, Salthe's books explain this in detail. He coined the term cogent moment.

http://projects.isss.org/doku.php?id=principle_of_scalar_levels

So how would change emerge then? — Metaphysician Undercover

By the emergence of its other - the lack of change that stands as the backdrop which makes it, with counterfactual definiteness, "a change".

If time and change emerge, as you say, then prior to change, there would be no change. — Metaphysician Undercover

But also no lack of change either. There would be no stasis to speak of.

Perhaps there was absolutely nothing before time and change, — Metaphysician Undercover

Well that ain't logical is it? What would this "nothing" measure its nothingness against?

But if it is eternal, it must be an eternal changelessness, so how could change emerge from eternal changelessness? — Metaphysician Undercover

You see how you keep dropping stasis out of the discussion. You simply presume the thing that gives the idea of "change" any crisp meaning can be taken for granted.

Once you start honestly asking yourself about how stasis could be the case, then the lightbulb might go off.

Hey, you made the blanket statement, "you can't argue with science after all". I wasn't referring to cosmological designations, — Metaphysician Undercover

But clearly I was.

It works for me as the most reasonable cosmology. You can't argue with science after all. — apokrisis

I was referring to more simple, basic things like 40 or 50 years ago when science determined that butter is bad for you, and margarine was supposed to be the saviour. Now it seems like science says the opposite. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or maybe the science was never binary in this fashion. It was simply the science reporting, meeting a simplistic public expectation, that presented such a crisply binary answer.

I often wish you'd provide references to companion literature, — Terrapin Station

You mean like....? http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/NatPhil_of_entropy.pdf

Well, is it just identical to the world and the mind? In that case, calling it a "deeper structure" doesn't make much sense. — Terrapin Station

You are trying to fit things into a view of existence that lacks spatiotemporal scale. You are imagining reality as an atomistic state of affairs in which "everything that is" is crammed into the one place at the one time. You are adopting a synchronic or present tense view of existence when its reality is integrated across a hierarchy of "cogent moments" or spatiotemporal scales.

This is a really fundamental ontological difference here. And until you can understand what it would mean to take a holistic point of view on the issue, you are just going to keep talking past any post I might make.

Right, but the "thoughtless world", although it doesn't 'possess thoughts' is always already in the form of thought. To put it another way, 'anything' that is not in the form of thought is as nothing. — John

The use of psychological terminology here is to risk blurring pansemiosis with panpsychism. So it has to be done carefully.

But I would point out that thought for humans is both thoughtful (that is articulate and attentional) and thoughtless (that is automatic or habitual).

So you could say - as Peirce did - that the world is inveterate habit. It has the character of thought turned thoughtless and completely fixed in its ways.

So there is a common form in play - the triadic structure of a sign relation. But even in ourselves. there is a sharp contrast between the freshly thought, the creatively free thought, and the thoughts which have long fossilised into stable pragmatic habits, the reactions or relations "we" no longer have to think about, and so which in fact now constitute us psychologicallly as this "we".

Applying this to the Universe, you can say then that all its spontaneity has been pretty much spend. There is only a Planck scale uncertainty that remains at base. The Universe is not thinking actively anymore. It has no "we" separate from the inveterate physical habits which pretty much completely constitute it now.

Again, this is all a very psychological kind of description of the metaphysics. Pansemiosis as a putative scientific project would want to tie in with physical science more than psychological science (while also insisting that the two are structurally "the same").

And this is what looks to be happening because fundamental physics has taken its decisive turn towards an information theoretic and thermodynamic formulation. What could be more perfectly poised as a balancing of the mental and the physical than to render a description of reality in terms of "information"?

Information means both at the same time the quantification of mental uncertainty and material certainty. It measures both sides of the equation the same way, and allows their exact conversion.

This is why pansemiosis is now something worth talking about. Physics is already there (even if it wouldn't describe itself in those terms just yet).