(one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there). — StreetlightX

The origins of motility are worth mentioning as a charming example of the dichotomous logic of symmetry-breaking.

The simplest movement is created by the spiraling tail, the flagella, of a bacterium. Rotate the bundle of threads in one direction and they tangle up to propel the cell in a straight line. Switch the rotation in the other direction and the threads untangle, causing the cell to now tumble randomly.

So the cell can swim down a chemical gradient - receptors telling it to get going straight if it is heading towards food, or away from toxins. Then if the cell is getting no such clear signal, it reverses the motor and tumbles about until something comes up as a signal to get going again.

So it is a neat example of a structural asymmetry - directed action vs random search. And the same semiotic logic persists into the left/right dichotomous division of the human brain. Left for focused directed action, right for exploratory thought and open vigilance. Then in cosmological modelling, determinism vs randomness, constraints vs freedoms, synechism vs tychism, repeat the distinction at a logical intellectual level.

The way we swim through the world is the way we swim through ideas.

If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time. — StreetlightX

Great. Except...

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, whereas my own interests lie in the direction of a more general understanding of what it is to know. We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

...which appears to stress the differentiation over the integration.

First in your philosophy comes the primacy of biological embodiment - laudable in its greater generality than semiotic mechanism. Then second - in "mongering" fashion - comes the parasitic socially constructed aspect of intellect (which doesn't here seem to be naturally related to the sensate body and the phenomenology of aesthetics).

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. — apokrisis

I should add that my approach also then may lead back to aesthetics in that having recognised its inherently socially-constructed nature, that gives philosophy the useful job of figuring out what that social contruction ought to be. So to the degree we have to invent/discover the right aesthetic evaluative responses to be learnt, then that is the bit which is the work in progress.

So yes, we want a successful individual-level embodiment of cognition. Yet we can't find that in either biology or culture alone. Instead it is how the two levels of semiotic adaptation can arrive at their most fruitful balance in personal experience that is the question.

Now that is the issue with materialism or scientism that simply seems to deny that such a balance might be an end game. But also - where the romantics take offence - it does suggest that the human psycho-social balance is a game playing out within a still larger game of thermodynamics. In the end, philosophy in this vein has to make proper contact with material semiosis - materiality in some generally determining form.

So yes, personally we would want an aesthetic which is a felt guide to how to flourish. We would want to be so embodied in that way of being it is a sensible habit. But to get there, we would have to construct a scaffolding culture.

That is another reason why SX's posts have been quite objectionable in this thread. For instance, Wayfarer speaks for religious traditions that may have proved quite functional in terms of achieving such an aesthetic of flourishing. Likewise the chain of being.

So the level of philosophical analysis might be weak, and yet the historically-developed cultural prescription could pragmatically work.

Likewise, we all almost instinctively support feminism or oppose consumerism, or whatever. But from a philosophical point of view, actual positions must be argued for rather than simply ticked off as standard issue ideological at a certain point in modern cultural history.

I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that. — The Great Whatever

Fine, And I'm going a step further in claiming that the emergent constraints aren't bizarre but natural in their developmental inevitability. Human grammar and the laws of thought are Platonic in that sense. They wound up having the only form they could have in taking semiosis to its rationalising extreme.

That was why Greek mathematics and logic was the big deal that got philosophy going. It was the first glimpse that existence could actually be a rational structure in a true sense. And now semiosis is a theory of how rational structure emergently develops with historical inevitability - getting us past the earlier problems of Platonic idealism where it is murky how the perfect forms interact with the messy material world to do the job of imposing necessity on contingency.

Platonic transcendence - an ontology of existence - gets fixed by Peircean immanence, a process view where the rule of law is instead replaced an inevitability of emergent habit.

Check human grammatical structure or logical form and there is a least action principle expressing itself. Of the many possible ways of thinking, it fast boiled down to an optimal structure that was the shortest distance to intelligible and persistent states of organisation - truths so true to seem eternal, and even always there even before they appeared in actuality.

As such, the human experience of language - or rather human language tout court - is shaped by the fact that we are motile, kinesthetic, haptically sensitive and habit-engendered beings. — StreetlightX

You have been either missing or avoiding my original point.

Yes, I have always agreed with the embodied or enactive view of mental experience. I was already arguing that in the 1980s against the cogsci functionalism of that era.

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything. My argument is that this is a retreat towards solipsistic idealism and panpsychism in that it tries to make the phenomenology of feeling primary in philosophical positions. And that is a monism which is much too reduced. The right kind of most general philosophic grounding - the place from which to answer all deep human questions - is instead the irreducible triadism of hierarchical semiotic structure.

So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception - a cultural rationalisation about biologically embodied processes of sensibility or evaluation. To talk about "aesthetics" is already to frame the thing in itself in an abstracting structure of words that embed a collection of cultural prejudices.

And this is just what you demonstrate by launching into rants about what is natural, what is wrong. It seems because you feel a certain way about manual labour vs intellectual activity, feminism vs patriachy, or whatever political agenda motivates you in some moment, then it is your conscious feelings that legitimate the stance. You talk as if any right-minded person would have to experience the same aesthetic response, and so phenomenology wins the argument.

But human emotions are socially constructed. There is the same animal machinery, but words are already getting in there and structuring experience from infancy. So if aesthetics is in the "mind" of anything, it is in the mind of a particular culture. That is its proper level of embodiment - if we must reduce towards a canonical level where the idea formative information, the constraints, are embodied as a state of remembering.

Again, you have agreed in the past about the socially constructed, language dependent, nature of human introspective awareness. To "look inside at ourselves and our qualia" is a skill that has to be learnt - one taught us by our social context, and so a set of ideas that evolved beyond us individually for its own (always philosophically questionable) reasons.

Thus to then turn around and say, no, look inside and there really just is this affective quality which is basic to experience and so the ground of philosophic epistemology, doesn't stack up. One can't look inwards to discover the "aesthetic". One has to look outwards to the cultural history, the rational intelligibility, of its (still evolving) social development as an idea.

And yes, again, there has to be some neurobiology that social contructionism can hook into. If you tell me that there is a Romantic response which is feeling the sublime, then I can check and say yes I get what you mean when I stand alone atop of a mountain, or whatever.

But hey, that is still a really bad foundation for philosophy. I shouldn't ignore the fact you are speaking for a social attitude which has evolved for its own reasons - reasons I ought to take into account against some larger scheme of nature which actually talks about the formation of such discursive structures.

And this is where Peircean semiotics gets it right. It makes that foundational connection between mind and matter - or now symbol and matter, constraint and freedom. Semiotics gets at the common mechanism that directly connects discursive structure and dissipative structure - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics, to use Pattee's term. Or infodynamics as Salthe sums it up in his semiotic take on hierarchy theory.

Phenomenology is always going to be a misleading exercise if it is set up as a search inside for what is nakedly really there. We end up only creating the very thing we claim to be finding when we check and see that subliminity is an affective response we feel when we set up our state of thought according to the appropriate cultural prescription. Instead, what phenomenological training should set us up to look for - if semiosis is the correct model of course - is semiosis at work inside our own heads, creating its characteristic kind of organisation.

On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them. — The Great Whatever

This is one of the points I think is interesting here. It is a speculative way of putting it, but it is as if the Universe is talking about itself in having its Platonic organisation emerging as the end game in our philosophic/scientific modelling.

That was the step Peirce wanted to make. Our human instinct for "reasonableness" could be either just arbitrary - just a very limited kind of Procrustean view we impose on existence with no deep justification. Or it could be in fact the very organisational principle by which the Universe itself self-organises into being. The Universe actually is rational in that it is like the development of an "embodied" mental habit, and exercise in rendering vague possibility as crisp logical counterfactuality.

So the contrast is between this pansemiotic metaphysics and SX's apparently panpsychic/idealist approach where he stresses phenomenology/aesthetics/sensibility - the experiential feel of things rather than the rational structure of things.

I don't deny that experience is where it all must start for us epistemically. It is really important to counter the usual reductionist view which simply wants to bypass all the problems of defining what it is to be a mind - in contrast to being a body. So taking an embodied approach to consciousness is absolutely the right thing to do.

But I take that already for granted. And my argument then picks up at the point where we have to turn back to talking about the material world. Peircean semiotics says we must see the material world as generally "mindful" in its mechanisms, but we don't want to then just be idealistic in a dualistic sense of saying that that mindfulness is some kind of dilute substance - a grade of some elemental mentalistic property as panpsychism does.

So the human mind is biologically rooted, and language/culture appear parasitic on that embodied state of sensibility. But language opened the door to a logico-mathematical level of cosmology modelling. And that does arguably - in its potential for Platonic-strength abstraction - create a conversation in which the Universe is speaking of itself now. Its principles are being articulated in ways that are forced onto us by their reality now that we have a suitably universal form of semiotic mechanism in words and counting, grammar and logic.

what is your opinion on multiverse theory; and its possible implications on the points made above? — Mustapha Mond

Well, as an extremum principle, the number of universes is either going to be 1 or infinity. Either creation is unbound, meaning an unlimited number of possibilities must exist, or there is instead a reason for creation being limited, and so only one generic outcome is possible.

Examples of such constraints on fecundity would be a cosmic selection principle of some kind - creation starts with all possibilities trying to get going, but then in a winner takes all race, only one solution emerges. This is supported by quantum physics and its path integral or sum over histories approach. The least action principle applied to the entirety of existence would say that our universe must be the most optimal possible path in some sense. And that would tie in with ontic structural realism which says that the maths of symmetry breaking - as told by lie group analysis - has only one set of possible solutions.

So in general, I would say it either has to be the case that the number of kinds of worlds is infiinite or just one. And what decides that is whether physics can say that reality is ruled by evolving constraints or whether reality is unlimitedly fecund.

Then you have to add that multiverse thinking itself spans this range. So if you take Linde's eternal spawning inflation, then this is really a number of worlds = 1 story. It all begins with an inflaton field that cools locally to spin off a fractal distribution of world-lets. So this process of world-making is future-eternal - an infinity of daughter universes gets produced. However - as has been argued as a mathematical theorem - this kind of multiverse is past-finite. The ever-branching inflating field must itself be traceable back to some definite root event that marks its beginning in time. So in that sense, inflationary existence counts as just a 1 world solution (as why an inflationary field of just those properties and not every other? Some fecundity limiting principle must apply).

So where I stand on multiverses is that I am generally against them because of a larger commitment to a physics where crisp fecundity is always in fact the product of crisp limits. You can't have definite possibilities except in the presence of definite constraints.

An analogy is a die. A perfectly symmetrical object would be a sphere. Toss a sphere and you can't really say it lands on a face. It lands on an infinity of points and so it is always rather vague or indefinite as to what "number" you just rolled. But a cube is a broken symmetry - a shape now constrained in a particular fashion. It is designed so it must come to rest on one of six faces. So it is the definiteness of constraint that produces the definiteness of counterfactual outcomes - you can roll some crisp possible number between 1 and 6.

Multiverses are popular because reasoning with infinity is fun. It produces every kind of weirdness you can imagine. And folk like it that science seems to be promising this kind of magic - a multiverse story where right now you are writing these words to me, rather than the other way round. And also an infinity of worlds where I am ending this post with bkdpot, and an infinity more where I end it with every other possible letter combination.

My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function — StreetlightX

That's great if you understand that a dichotomy spells mutuality - and thus is an anti-reductionist notion. Or in fact, a holistic notion as the mutuality spells a mixing and so an irreducible triadic complexity of process - a hierarchical organisation.

Such was the shrillness of your earlier posts that this kind of holism wasn't coming through. But I'll take your word for it that this is what you meant all along. ;)

Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference. — StreetlightX

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense?

In mathematics, the Poincare recurrence theorem states that "a system whose dynamics are volume-preserving and which is confined to a finite spatial volume will, after a sufficiently long time, return to an arbitrarily small neighbourhood of its initial state". — Mustapha Mond

But the Universe is in fact an expanding-cooling space with event horizons. So recurrence has to be considered in the light of that.

Time is not infinite in the Newtonian sense but instead winding down to a Heat Death. Earlier negentropic states won't be revisited because there will not be sufficient energy density left to permit it.

Equally, the oscillating universe theory, originally supported by Einstein, speculates that that the known universe ends in a "big crunch" which is followed by another big bang and another crunch etc. etc. in a process which continues indefinitely. — Mustapha Mond

Recycling does open a door to such recurrence. But while still a very fashionable idea in cosmological speculation, the evidence is against it.

Observations of dark energy or the cosmological constant say there will be an actual heat death for the Universe. So unless something can somehow switch off that guaranteed expansion, a big crunch cannot happen.

And even recycling makes any exact repetitions of history infinitely improbable. Everything would get scrambled in a collapse. And thermodynamic considerations make it likely that each rebirth would be less energetic than the last.

So invoking infinity always buys you every possibility it seems. But remember that every actual rebirth is as unlikely as it is possible to repeat the previous one. And so yes, the maths of infinity seems to suggest no problem. Even if rebirth itself spawns infinite variety, each variant will not only be repeated at some stage, but repeated an infinite number of times itself.

The maths of infinity is handy like that. It imposes no limits on existence. But also it doesn't sound exactly realistic, does it? And if you are relying on infinite time, that is already a dubious kind of notion in being a Newtonian kind of conception of a dimension of change or entropification.

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon? — StreetlightX

It would be nice if you defined what you mean by aesthetic in this (apparently) ontic context.

Sure, I agree that neurobiological evolution results in embodied valuation. There is an emotional reaction to all that is the focus of attentional processes. So there is no doubting there is a phenomenology.

But to call it "aesthetic" is an appeal to something much more Platonic and ideal in normal usage - the holy trinity of truth, beauty and the good. And really, none of those has much to do with neurobiological level responses. Rather they too are discursive formations that have developed culturally.

So it would be quite wrong to mix up the two levels of valuation - the biological and the cultural. Especially when you mean to use the cultural sense to describe the embodied neurobiology.

In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers — StreetlightX

So clearly I argue that language is not a particular kind of aesthetic phenomenon, but instead a general kind of semiotic mechanism. And so philosophy would need to consider the way language does mark a new level of break.

Again, there is continuity of semiosis in nature - at least from a Peircean pansemiotic perspective. So biological organisation and systems of meaning (your aesthetics/sensate body) are also explained by semiotic mechanism (messages, switches, paths, codes). But then there is a radical stepping up of things because of language and cultural evolution.

Now a point about semiotics as a theory of meaning - why it is not a hollow term like "aesthetics" - is that it can be explained in material terms. Or rather, as formally dichotomous to materiality.

Symbols create a further informational dimension to reality - one hidden within the material world with its dissipative flows. This is what Pattee's epistemic cut, or Rosen's categoric distinction between metabolism and replication, is about.

Just as a computer's circuits can symbolically represent any idea for the same physical cost, so DNA can represent any protein (and hence the organisation of any metabolic process), and words can represent any thought (and hence the organisation of any social process).

Thus we have a physicalist account with semiosis. Symbols can regulate material flows because they exist in a dimension of information orthogonal to those flows. They stand apart to create a source of action that the physical world simply can't prevent .

So unlike this vague notion of aesthetics or phenomenological value, semiotics speaks to an actual fundamental physical break that is matter~symbol. And then - in foregrounding the issue of the machinery - it also says why there is a radical difference between animals (with just genes and neurons) and then humans (with genes, neurons and words - and numbers now too).

So to talk about language as a superior form of sensibility is crap. Sensibility is the product of genes and neurons (even animals are aware and anticipating). But words and numbers play out at a new cultural and abstract level of semiosis.

Yes, the two are intertwined intimately in neurodevelopment. Language structures sensibility - and needs in return to be grounded in sensibility. But they evolve in separate worlds. The senses evolve biologically, discursive structures evolve culturally. And it is the right kind of thing for words to be doing to regulate that sensibility in pursuit of social goals. That is nature in action. Selfhood - and the aesthetic attitudes that might seem bound up in that - is a social construction.

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti- the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature. Whereas I see it as part of the continuity of nature - nature's other hidden dimension. You say language is just more sensate bodilyness - a means to co-ordinate intersubjectivity. And sure, that is the everyday part of it - getting the social group to feel the same way. But then language does also develop an intellectual life of its own that clearly goes beyond immediate human needs and wanders off into metaphysics and mathematics and cosmology.

We were already the vessel for social ideas playing out way above our heads. And now even abstracta has taken off as almost a lifeform of its own.

Again, I have no problem with debates over whether this is a good or bad thing, a natural or artificial thing. There are arguments both ways. But the point is that semiosis gives you an ontic framework that its precise here. Whereas your use of "aesthetics" as a theory of meaning seems vague, ill-founded, and unilluminating so far. It seems merely to exist as a way to force through whatever popular PC politics is the predominant meme within your own social peer group. As you have employed it to date, it is a tool of rhetoric, not philosophy.

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

I didn't make your shit up about the primacy of aesthetics. So again, what justifies this "we" that exists pre-linguistically. When was the last time Homo sap was pre-linguistic, if ever?

What argument? — StreetlightX

Humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men. — StreetlightX

Non sequitur. Drop the pose of the valiant hero and deal with the argument.

But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged. — StreetlightX

Why always so thin skinned and confrontational? If you can explain how your rejection of the chain of being is done within the context of a more general acceptance of the naturalness of hierarchies, then please just do so.

I've already made my point - that you seem simply intent on making the lower higher in good Christian fashion. In your own words, sensation, manual labour and political correctness are all of real value, while cognition, intellectualism and dead white males are somehow all dangerous to what matters.

But that is as trite an analysis as the position it attacks. For example, as I say, humans are naturally already more than mere sensate bodies. We are fundamentally discursive beings. So it is phony and romantic to claim that human embodiment is rooted in biology in a way that might invalidate its - ever increasing - roots in the cultural.

You probably can't deny the logic of that, which is why we are having all this ad hom diversionary posting now.

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good. — StreetlightX

So are you making a point about the lower and higher rankings of things or not?

Your complaint was that women get ranked lower than men (if above animals), that sensation is ranked lower than cognition, that manual labour is ranked lower than intellectualising. And you seemed to be claiming this was a hierarchical positioning that is "against nature". So my reply is that this anti-hierarchical tendency - very familiar from Romanticism, Marxism and Post-Modernism - is a load of wishful piffle. It is something that you won't argue here because you cannot justify it.

But please keep pretending it was all some kind of careless slip of the tongue. Now that you can see where this is going, time for you to hop of the bus.

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do. — StreetlightX

In case you forgot....

The Great Chain of Being. Among the most important of the continuities with the Classical period was the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Its major premise was that every existing thing in the universe had its "place" in a divinely planned hierarchical order, which was pictured as a chain vertically extended.

http://faculty.up.edu/asarnow/greatchainofbeing.htm

The spirit is not to be known by discursive reasoning, but by the natural activity of embodied intuition. So, I would say that the nature of order is the order of nature, but it is not limited to the order of nature discovered by science. There is a whole other order of nature to be revealed by the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious and the spiritual. — John

The problem with this thesis is that animals might be all about embodied cognition but Homo sapiens is a linguistic species. Our brains are shaped also by discursive reason from the earliest stage. We need culture to complete our development - our brains are designed for that because of their greatly delayed maturity. Even the teenage years are a phase of neural development that seems to have been absent in Homo erectus.

So SX is quite wrong in treating "sensate bodies" as if they were the primal natural condition of humans. We have already evolved past that stage because language created something much larger.

Sure, it is important that we are embodied in a world - the basic point of a modelling relations or semiotic approach to epistemology. But we are embodied in a cultural world too. So it is a Romantic fallacy to talk about "going back to nature" to recover the special goodness that is ... ecstatic dance or whatever.

Humans can't un-invent being linguistic and hence rational in the way grammatical habits structure all thought.

When someone says "this limited, tiny sphere of being is what I think matters more than anything else' (be it spirit or molecules or God), then by definition everything else is of a lesser value. — StreetlightX

But you are simply adding values, sensation, social equality and nature to the list. So all claims still need to be argued.

For instance, you seem to be appealing to nature and yet railing against hierarchical organisation. Perhaps you just don't understand hierarchies sufficiently well, but there is plenty of reason to believe nature truly has to be hierarchical.

So maybe - almost certainly - you are projecting a Romantic fallacy on the world. And arguably nothing has done more harm to modern civilisation than the unnatural confusion that is Romanticism (as a way of life, as opposed to some diversionary cultural fun).

Check out something like Mark Johnston's The Meaning of the Body or Maxine Sheets-Johnston's The Roots of Thinking[/]i. Deleuze and Levinas have also written some wonderful things about this, but I would not expect that'd you'd ever read them. — StreetlightX

Sure. I've checked that kind of stuff out in the past and found it not compelling. I just wanted to see you support your claims in your own words for a change. Will the ideas seem so convincing when they haven't been cut and pasted?

We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects. — StreetlightX

Great. But what does that mean? How is being a sensate body not to be in an anticipatory or Bayesian modelling relation as a neuroscientist for instance would understand it?

As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, — StreetlightX

Why would one believe in that primacy? What is the argument?

And then how does aesthetics work as a method of knowledge (as opposed to say unargued, unsubstantiated, belief)? I've never seen that explained.

When we conceptualize flux, we imagine things like waves, wind, changing patterns, orbits, chaos, etc. But although this picture's contents are changing, the concept itself is not. What is being presented to us - the given-ness - is the same. — darthbarracuda

What do you mean exactly. If flux only manifests as a regularity of pattern, aren't we then talking about form rather than matter?

I prefer to reason that the only thing that never changes is that there is always change. So the regularity of pattern talks about the relative success the world has in constraining irregularity to at least a reasonable level of patterning. But beyond that, only shifting sands.

It's when models cannot be made near the fringes of thought that the models break down. — schopenhauer1

It is a genuine issue that modelling is procrustean. If you have a hammer, everything is a nail. Existence might be ontically vague, and yet still we want to model it in terms of definite counterfactuals.

So yes, this is an issue. But also - pragmatically - we can be aware of it. Even model it.

That is what science means when crackpots come up with ideas that are "not even wrong". Or they produce theories with too many parameters and so can be adjusted endlessly to fit any data.

So there is a tension between the bottom-up causality of material and efficient causes and the top-down causality of formal and final causation. — darthbarracuda

Yes, a productive tension. Formally, they are complementary kinds of causes - free construction shaped by emergent limits.

But what needs to still be explained is why the whole drama of evolution played out the way it did: why such-and-such happened and not something else, and not just by an appeal to material/efficient causation (i.e. science). — darthbarracuda

But material/efficient causation does a very poor job of explaining why accidents happen. Whereas contraints-based thinking explains accidents as the result of systematic indifference.

If there is a global telos that cares, then that also represents a global unconcern in terms of what doesn't matter, what doesn't need to be controlled.

Thus what I am seeing as final causes are not just tendencies or habits as a system evolves but as seemingly static "laws of nature" — darthbarracuda

Where's the problem? Habits don't need to change if they continue to work. We can call them laws to show that we believe they have become that fixed. But that smacks of transcendent mechanism. And so in the end, the idea of developmental habits is a better way to show how regularity arises because it also provides its own means to keep reconstructing itself. A habit is a state of organisation that keeps perpetuating itself through its action.

Which is why I don't think dynamicism can fully account for all of nature. The plant can wave in the wind but the roots keep it stuck in the ground as they are themselves static. — darthbarracuda

But my account requires stasis as well as flux. It just says stasis emerges via a limitation on flux. Whereas you have the Parmidean puzzle of how stasis could ever allow change.

So if we wind the developmental clock back a bit beyond your rooted plants, in what sense was there solid ground during the radiation phase of the Hot Big Bang?

I like Heil's version: properties are dual-nature, both a quality and a disposition. — darthbarracuda

That again just reserves reality for bottom-up constructive causality. You have quality standing for material cause, disposition for efficient cause. And top-down constraint - the contexual causality of formal and final organisation - gets left out of the picture again.

So yes, there is a duality here. But of bottom-up vs top-down modes of causality. And substantial objects are what arise inbetween as the causal actors (in a relatively a-causal void).

Dispositions is talk about the way a world of objects acts (having an empty stage to act upon). But that doesn't say why those relational possibilities exist. For that you have to step back to the metaphysical view that can account for both actors and stages. What global constraints suppress general possibility in a way that produces the matching thing of particular local being? How is a cool and large vacuum created so as to leave atomistic particles standing small and sharp?

These are the kinds of questions a systems approach answers.

It was you who talked about non-conscious creatures. So I just went along with your use of terminology.

Did you want to distinguish now between sentience (in jumping spiders), consciousness (in squid) and self-consciousness (in language-equipped humans) now?

I think I am defending the notion that entropy-in-action is asymmetry in action. Maybe the state of maximum entropy (heat death?) can be understood to be, in some sense, a maximally symmetrical state, but I have also heard it referred to as a state of maximum disorder, which suggests maximal asymmetry. — John

Yep. The asymmetry refers to the path or negentropic structure that gets you there. And then the symmetry is where the journey starts and ends.

However that is the simple view. And as you get into the detail, it becomes more awkward to make such an absolute distinction stick. This is because symmetry and symmetry-breaking aren't two distinct things, just two contrasting aspects of a general developmental trajectory (in my book).

This is why thermodynamics has a bundle of laws including the third. If you imagine a simple system like an ideal gas - non-interacting particles rattling around inside a container - there are two opposing states of maximum order. You could start off with all the particles in the same corner. Or instead, you could start off with all the particles exactly evenly spaced on a lattice or grid.

So two states that maximise order. And so disordering becomes the state sandwiched inbetween this upper and lower bound. If you release a gas from either of these two states, it will scramble both of them to arrive at a Gaussian statistical mix of positions and momenta. The gas will average itself away from being either stuck in a corner, or spread out with the geometric perfection of a lattice.

It seems that being released from a grid leaves a shorter distance to arriving at pure disorder. But still, that lower bound on entropy is why a third law of thermodynamics was needed.

So in this way, if you keep scrambling things, you could wind up coming out the other side to start getting more ordered again. And this is what the second law forbids. The equilibrium state is when all sources of constraint and freedom are in thermal balance - local differences cease to make a global difference.

This is a good article on the subtleties still being discovered....

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160712-hyperuniformity-found-in-birds-math-and-physics/

Torquato and a colleague launched the study of hyperuniformity 13 years ago, describing it theoretically and identifying a simple yet surprising example: “You take marbles, you put them in a container, you shake them up until they jam.”

The marbles fall into an arrangement, technically called the “maximally random jammed packing,” in which they fill 64 percent of space. (The rest is empty air.) This is less than in the densest possible arrangement of spheres — the lattice packing used to stack oranges in a crate, which fills 74 percent of space.

But lattice packings aren’t always possible to achieve. You can’t easily shake a boxful of marbles into a crystalline arrangement.

So note how maximum achievable disorder is the fluid solution. Marbles can only compact so far down through random motion - motion that does not pick out marbles and arrange them individually, just relies on an average degree of common settlement. Every marble is free to reverse its path during the shaking - there is a classical time reversal physics symmetry describing its individual motion. But collectively there is an emergent asymmetry as the marbles do evolve towards a single global average that tightly constrains their disorder to a single packing number.

So again, what ties it together is the semiotic definition of symmetry-breaking or asymmetry as a difference that makes a difference. And symmetry as differences that don't make a difference.

For a thermalising system, it makes a difference globally that it has gone from an ordered state to a disordered one. But a system in thermal balance is one that changes constantly without the changes making a general difference.

Did Aristotle argue for self-generalizing habits? I thought that was Peirce's addition - after all, Aristotle did think the universe was eternal if I remember correctly, and that there were distinct natural kinds, something that would have come into conflict with evolution and general cosmological findings but Peirce managed to fill with his idea of habits. — darthbarracuda

Yep. Aristotle mixes and matches a few different strands of thought and so it can't be said he spoke unambiguously for a single organic vision. But see for instance his notion of entelechy. Or the way he echoed Anaximander on the origin of the four elements.

But if these powers exist outside of a substantial form, how do they exist? The mother that aborts the baby still has powers herself, namely, to abort the baby. — darthbarracuda

Well yes. But that is exactly the kind of complex purpose that complex life/mind is capable of evolving as something internal to its system.

We have not only the clear notion of abortion, and well-developed material means, but also a strong framework of law.

So really, mothers have the power only in the sense that there is a social machinery in place. They can make a choice in that context.

If we watch the creature's behaviour, and notice that it appears to act with purpose, we have reason to believe that it acts with intention. However, we see all kinds of creatures that we know are not conscious, which appear to act with purpose. Therefore, acting with purpose, or intention, is not a good indicator as to whether or not a thing is conscious. — Metaphysician Undercover

The essential difference here would seem to be that we call purpose conscious when it involves a conscious choice. That is, when the organism knows it is doing one thing and not another.

I could give money to a beggar because it will make him feel good. Or maybe the real purpose is that it just makes me feel good. So am I acting out of generosity or self-regard? To the extent that I can sort my intentions into polar alternatives, I am taking another step up in my consciousness.

So when we watch a creature act, we might be able to see it could have acted differently, but is that a choice it was aware of?

And so this is what justifies a graded spectrum of intentionality or telos in nature of tendency/function/purpose.

Telos in nature starts out as a propensity - the likelihood of something happen that has a vague family resemblance.

Then it can become crisply functional - a hardwired response to a learnt situation.

Then it can become crisply optional - it is a choice within a context. Action is justified in terms of it not being its binary other.

So telos is the universal growth of reasonableness. It starts out as the most generic kind of constraint on freedom - a tendency. And it achieves its most definite form when it is fully dichotomous - a crisp choice between two formally contradictory life paths.

Recently there has been an increase in power ontologies, which is reminiscent of Aristotelian and Scholastic metaphysics, especially since powers are "internal" to things. Power (or dispositions) act like a causal web. — darthbarracuda

Things were going well until you smuggled this reductionism back in. :)

Formal and final cause are better understood as contextual properties or powers rather than intrinsic ones. Material and efficient cause are rightfully located within substantial objects. But the shaping and directing of matter is something that comes from without.

Now this is what leads to the problems of transcendental metaphysics - the idea that nature is ruled by external laws, Platonic forms, or hands of gods.

But there is also the immanent metaphysics of Aristotle where form and purpose are developmentally emergent and self-organising regularities. So the world itself must develop intelligible order. And having done so, that order is imposed locally everywhere to create substantial being.

And that fits right in with modern physics, especially quantum theory. All electrons in the universe are identical (and hence entanglable) because they all express the same symmetry-breaking structural regularity. For an electron to be, it has no choice but to have that contextually-dictated form.

Where a confusion arises is that life and mind is based on symbolism - digital codes - and so has a way to internalise formal and final cause. Biology can form memories for its shapes and goals. It can bury that kind of contextual information deep within itself as - principally - the program that gets stored in a genetic code.

So with biology, what was in physics strictly outside the shaping of substantial being, gets moved inside. Symbolism creates a new kind of internal dimension where constraints (formal and final cause) can be curled up into a tiny ball of memory, to then be exercised "at will".

So the danger here is being anthropomorphic and thinking that formal and final cause are naturally inside things as powers or properties, rather than outside them as the global context or constraints which give matter shape and direction.

Now physical objects can also have a form of memory. Rocks or rivers are complex arrangements that bear the imprint of their past and so do also seem to own the power of a shape and a direction. So on that score, the world does start to seem as if it has internalised the form and finality in a local fashion.

But again that is not the most generic view. The generic view - as taken at the quantum or particle physics level - is that every event is fundamentally contextual. Particles are just excitations in a field. Like a plucked string, they have no choice but to sound the note that is dictated by their structural context.

So formal and final cause stand for the global contextual constraints which emerge to regulate local particular material being. They are completely external as causes.

However that fundamental view then gets complicated because there is also the possibility of substances developing memories. Either just because not every process flows at the same rate (rocks are too cold to respond fluidly to the world like hot larva), or because constructing a memory became possible through the evolution of semiotic codes (membranes, genes, neurons, words, numbers), then formal and final cause could come to be something that sits "inside" a substantial being. The rules for shaping matter could be a power internaliised.

What you say here seems to be in agreement with what I was saying, and yet you seem think you are disagreeing. — John

You seem to be defending the notion that entropy = asymmetry.

I am saying that a state of entropy is a state of equilbrium - so a general symmetry in terms of its local fluctuations or differences.

But that then describes closed systems gone to equilibrium. And how this aspect of the thread got going was when far from equilbrium thermodynamics was introduced - or the still more generic thing of self-organising dissipative structure.

So the dissipative structure view talks about how symmetries can be broken by structural asymmetries - paths that point down a hill to (relatively) higher entropy states.

And then to talk about the Universe - which is a dissipative structure that is also its own heat sink - takes us up yet another level to where both symmetry and asymmetry, entropy and negentropy, have to be understood as two sides of the same coin that emerge synergistically out of a more foundational vagueness or quantum indeterminism.

So we start off with conventional closed system mechanical notions of entropy - the classical Boltzmann ideal gas type models - and move progressively through ever expanded notions of system thermodynamics to arrive at a self-organising cosmos that is dissipating vagueness in effect. Both order and disorder are being produced in equal measure by breaking the even more foundational state of "symmetry" which is the unbounded apeiron.

So rather than disagreeing with you, I have been trying to provide some sense of how the essential question - is entropy symmetry or asymmetry? - might be viewed across a spectrum of increasingly holistic or systematic thermodynamic models.

And on the whole, a state of high entropy is measured in terms of a state of high symmetry - a state in which there is plenty of particular difference, but it doesn't make a general difference. Change happens freely - in the same way as trapped gas particles rattle around inside a flask forever, or blackbody photons rattle around inside an event horizon. But the temperature and pressure of the system remains unchanged despite all this apparent difference, all this apparent busy action, just as a circle looks the same whether it is at rest or spinning at any speed.

When I spoke of asymmetry and entropy being the same I had in mind systemic asymmetry not the asymmetry of individual entities. From a systemic perspective, considered in terms of gravity or mass, the black hole would seem to be the supreme asymmetry. — John

But your point of view is the unrealistic one that is imagining a single black hole in an unbounded void. So it is asymmetric in the sense of being everything massive lumped in the one place.

Yet as said, a black hole - as an event horizon of some entropic size - is as simple and symmetric state as it gets. A smooth sphere. So it has a temperature and a size, and that's it.

It is an asymmetry from one point of view - being hyperspheric curvature in contrast to the flat spacetime around it. But from its own point of view, it is a state of high symmetry.

And then from the world's point of view, the black hole is never alone. At the very least - for there to be a world that is generally flat - it would have to exist as part of a fractal distribution of black holes, an entropic symmetry from that point of view.

If all the black holes started to collect, then the whole of the Universe would be gravitationally collapsing and becoming a single ball of hyperspheric curvature.

In fact, the cosmological problem of a few years back was that the Universe appeared under-dense in terms of gravitating mass and so should be expanding and diluting rather faster than it is. This is why the further ingredient of dark energy or the cosmological constant fixes things. It ensures the Universe expands with a slightly hyperbolic curvature and so - in Red Queen fashion - it will in fact bottom out eventually in the scale symmetry of a heat death.

We will be bounded by event horizons at a fixed distance just a little larger than our near heat death condition today. So in a way, it will be like being inside a black hole looking out. We will be closed off by a wall of maximum entropy that makes further change inside our region of spacetime meaningless. You will still have a quantum sizzle of thermal fluctuations - the black body photons emitted by the event horizon - but it will do no work and not change the entropy.

A symmetry is a difference that doesn't make a difference. An asymmetry is a difference that does.

So for us as human scale observers, a black hole in our vicinity makes a difference. But for a Universe, the black hole doesn't if it is part of an even fractal distribution of such clumping (the cosmological flat balance), or as now seems the case, it only has to be roughly fractal as any clumping tendency is already being overwhelmed by many orders of magnitude by a general dark energy acceleration of spacetime - an acceleration that will put us inside a fixed event horizon that puts an end to thermal events that make any difference to the state of what is left within.

I see two senses of the word reductionism being used here.

One is the familiar one of a reduction to mechanical or atomistic ontological models of reality. The other is the simpler thing of just being the reduction to an ontological model.

So we can oppose reductionism to holism - contrast two different ontological models. Or we can talk about the epistemic fact that all knowledge of the world is a semiotic modelling relation and reductionism is formalising the fact that we seek models to structure our experience in rational ways.

So to reduce in the modelling sense is to break the messy substantial world of given experience apart into theories and measurements - formal ideas and relatively informal acts of inductive confirmation.

Even the naive brain models in this fashion. If a baby sees a dog disappear behind one end of a wall, it will learn to look to the other end in the expectation it will reappear in a moment. So the baby has a theory or idea. And then checks that model against a measurement - the act of watching the other end of the wall in expectation that its idea of the world will be empirically confirmed.

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'. — StreetlightX

But is reductive modelling - the familiar division into generals and particulars, concepts and percepts, theories and measurements - a bad thing or the natural thing?

I argue that this philosophical/scientific practice is simply a formalisation, a conscious refinement, of how minds already work. We break the world apart into its formal structures and material events for a very good reason. This is how modelling works.

And pragmatism accepts the anti-realist epistemic point that to exist in a realm of our own reductive conceptions is as good as it gets. Our view of reality is always trapped inside the model we spin. That is obvious enough when it comes to concepts or ideas - the stuff of theories. But it is also true even of the measurements or confirming impressions.

The baby sees a dog re-emerge as expected and so its belief is confirmed. But is it the same dog? Can this baby yet tell the difference between a dog and a goat? Etc.

Science just goes all the way and constructs theories that are confirmed in terms of numbers - symbols read off dials. The Kantian impossibility of actually grasping the thing in itself is dealt with by reducing even material experience to acts of counting - signs of the theory in mind.

So reductionism in the broad sense is the acceptance that all knowledge is a modelling relation. And that in turn leads to a dichotomy of theory and measurement which is what it is to model. And so reductionism is going to be at its best when taken to its epistemic extreme as it is in scientific reasoning - when experience is fully structured in being fully broken apart into formal concepts and answering acts of measurement.

Gravitational clumping would be symmetrical in its asymmetry if the distribution of matter ended up fractally spread.

Fractals have scale symmetry in that things look the same or self similar no matter what scale of observation is chosen. So a fractal is a maximum entropy condition.

This is exactly the kind of thinking which I am being critical of. Instead of singling out, and understanding the particular acts themselves, to see which one has which effect, they are all lumped together as random noise. However, within all that seemingly random noise, one intentional act may have a huge outcome over an extended period of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well what makes a fluctuation intentional rather than just actually being random noise?

Local intentional acts are possible. We humans - as the most complex kinds of thing - produce them all the time. But here we are talking of physics - the metaphysics of simplicity.

But you were clearly referring to how things "begin". So your analogy, that there are balls already rattling around, doesn't suffice. Introducing a new efficient cause into a sea of efficient causes does not describe a beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are just persistently grabbing the wrong end of the stick every time you face some fresh example. The point was that regardless of beginnings, context is what rapidly matters. A system - especially a Newtonian one with no foresight to avoid accidental collisions - is going to develop towards its equilibrium average behaviour pretty quickly.

Either way then, the direction of the tiny event may have great significance over the final outcome. — Metaphysician Undercover

From what point of view exactly? Especially if the outcomes all look generically the same.

So sure, the tale feels significant if you have a metaphysics dependent on every big event having its tiny triggering cause. But instead this is about how regularity arises from randomness in a self-organising fashion.

In that light, efficient causes become a metaphysical red herring. Or at least, it only makes sense to talk about them in retrospective fashion from some perspective where a form or purpose is said to have been achieved.

Didn't the revolutionary minority and the unrevolutionary majority get switched somewhere in this OP about the Trumpish appeal of authoritarian leaders? :)

But that was a funny analysis of Trump - particularly in highlighting his disgust of womanly secretions. There has to be something deeply wrong about a guy so intolerant of the unruly that he has to glue down his hair.

Did the article say Trump would be bold or simply rash and petulant? In truth, the summary I thought was that Trump is an empty narcissistic shell of a person constructed on the competitive notion of "the deal".

So he has internalised the idea that negotiations in life are about putting up a tough front. But then you need experts to help you out because you don't actually know much, and you might need to compromise once around the table, so every principle becomes flexible.

So the overall impression is that he would be a president whose prime goal was always to come out of every situation looking good - the winner in the deal - whatever unprincipled thing it took.

Are you attempting to deny that a small event can make a huge difference over a long period of time? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm making the point that material/efficient cause gets overplayed in regular metaphysics. The butterfly effect was understood by many in just the way you say - the smallest initiating event can have incredible consequences. Yet really, what it says is that the critical event was no better than random noise. There were any number of butterfly wings beating that same morning. To single out one as the prime mover is thus a retrospective fallacy. Especially if there was always a global attractor saying that every path was the first step to the same final destination.

So the beating of the butterfly wings is as contingent a material fact as you can get - just a fluctuation. And the weather that developed was the kind of weather that always develops - being ruled by formal/final cause.

But then you make a conclusion completely opposed to these observations, all paths are going to lead to the same eventual outcome. Where is your evidence, or what kind of principles are you following? — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this was the important thing that chaos theory modeled - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor

Changes closest to the beginning of any event have the most potential to change that event. This is due to the reality of momentum. From any point in space, motion can begin in any direction. Since such a beginning is necessarily an acceleration, the difficulty in adopting a different direction is exponential with the passing of time. Therefore the act at the beginning, being furthest back in time has the greatest influence over the final outcome. — Metaphysician Undercover

This may seem true of linear Newtonian mechanics. But it is not true of non-linear worlds in which feedback both amplifies and damps action at a collective level of interaction.

In real world full of interactions - like a chaos of billiard balls rattling around a table - any new ball you fire into the mess is going to have a high chance of being redirected. Most of the collisions are going to decelerate your ball, although there is also the slim chance that some collisions send it going even faster in the direction you intended. But either way, your initial act of acceleration to the ball will have exponentially less to do with its actual continuing behaviour over time.

A verbal animal would probably also need a reason to talk about the unpleasantness of one's mate, for instance (its mate, not your mate). — Bitter Crank

Or more than that, the animal would have to have the capacity for grammatical construction.

Words are one thing. Animals can learn hundreds of them. Rules of recursive sentence structure are a different matter. What Koko and all the other experiments show is no non-human develops the grammatical fluency which is part of human biology.

So you don't need to have a reason to talk. But you do need grammatical capacity to be able to speak in reasoned fashion.

The habits of thought, which would make someone posit something like a chance fluctuation, to facilitate one's metaphysical belief, have developed into a particular form of laziness which permeates the intellectual society. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not really. Instead, what it says is that if you try to strip reality back to some foundational material monism, what you arrive at is quite different from conventional linear notions of efficient cause. Instead of the particularity of some cause creating some effect, you instead have just thermal noise - pure fluctuation.

This is what the butterfly effect in deterministic chaos models was all about. The most innocuous fluctuation, like a beating wing, could retrospectively be blamed as the efficient cause of a big storm halfway around the world. But what that means is that in a non-linear world, trying to separate causal signal from causal noise in the usual way is futile. At the time, anything could have been the crucial trigger.

More important is the way events snowballed. And even more important is that there was some generic attractor - a global finality - towards which any such snowballing fluctuation was always going to tend. It really never mattered what might be said to break the initial symmetry as all paths were going to lead to much the same eventual outcome.

So this is the ontic message of dissipative structure theory. It doesn't really matter how things begin. Any old fluctuation will do as the fluctuations simply represent the infinity of particular ways to get rolling towards the one waiting generic global outcome. It is formal and final cause that tell the story.

And learning to tell such a different story of reality hardly seems intellectually lazy. The ball on the dome paradox is simply meant to illustrate what a basic problem the old Newtonian model of things in fact had.

According to Newtonian laws - which are all about crisp material/efficient causes - a ball sitting still would never have reason to move. But a view of reality founded on indeterminism says the opposite. Spacetime itself fluctuates on the smallest scale. It is noisy or grainy in a way that can't ultimately be suppressed.

And from there, the fact that fluctuations are largely suppressed - on our classical scale of observation - can be retrojected to the question of initial conditions. The beginning of everything must logically be a case of fluctuation unbounded - a roil or vagueness.

No, black-holes are not an exception. Black-holes have vastly more entropy than the matter that created them, be that a perfectly spherically distributed ideal gas or a solar system. Every state on the way to creating a black hole has greater entropy than the previous state. — tom

And yet black holes evaporate. So while clumping increases the entropy in terms of dissipating gravitational degrees of freedom, dark energy expansion is then a further complication that overwhelms that clumping given enough passing time. The highest entropy state becomes the blackbody radiation of minimal temperature cosmic event horizons on current physical understanding. It all ends with a fizzle of photons with a wavelength the span of the visible universe - the inverse of the Planck-scale state of things at the hot Big Bang.