What I am trying to get at is that it seems to me that without asymmetry there is no entropy and without entropy there is no asymmetry. Asymmetry seems to be the frozen image of entropy and entropy the moving image of asymmetry. — John

Symmetry and symmetry breaking do have to be flip sides of the same coin. That is basic metaphysical logic. Each has to be each other's other. That is why we talk about entropy and negentropy, or constraints and degrees of freedom. You need two opposites to tango.

Again, SX and I aren't just talking about entropy but the larger thermodynamical story of dissipative structure. And this ties together the two aspects of being that result in a world of structured dynamics.

So the asymmetry here speaks to another fundamental physical principle - the least action principle. When anything energetic happens, it must take the most direct route possible. It must in fact employ the path that results in the least overall effort. And so - as in the convection currents that form in a heated fluid - you have the apparently paradoxical situation of order erupting to further the production of disorder.

But rather than being a contradiction, this simply reflects the fact that nature must first divide itself into two for there to be anything systematic about existence at all. You have to have the yin and yang of the order that maximised the disordering.

For there to be a state of higher entropy, this must be revealed by the matching fact of there being the asymmetry of the path to access that more wasted state of global symmetry. To arrive at the bottom of the hill, there had to be the slope which was the hillside that was the path of least action.

I agree, but it is only wasteful (or not) from some perspective, no? — John

Great. You agree there is always the telos that is what makes for a point of view then. Observerless physics can make no sense.

But wouldn't the energy that gets wasted in any specific causally efficient process we might be focused on, always be the efficient cause of other processes? — John

Well given some other formal and final cause setting up a different design to achieve this other goal. The crumbs that fall off the table could feed the sparrows and ants.

But every such level of dissipative structure must be wasteful in its extraction of work. That is what the second law captures.

You are simply speaking of the world as if Newtonian atomism was the truth and not simply a working model.

So we are both dealing in theoretical constructs. You just don't seem to realise it.

And in fact this last, that the regularities due to efficient causation we witness everywhere and interpret as 'order', is really just entropy at work is just what I had thought you and apo have been arguing. — John

No. In thermodynamics, work is work, not entropy. It is that part of an energy flow which does get used in materially efficient causal fashion. Then the part that gets lost as heat and waste is lost potential - the entropy. It is the part of the flow that doesn't do work towards whatever purpose you had in mind.

It seems to me that entropy just is symmetry-breaking, which just is energy flow, which just is efficient causation. — John

If you are talking about a "state of maximum entropy", then you are talking about a state of final equilibrium symmetry - where things can't get messier even as things continue to freely mess around.

So "entropy" is a macroscopic quality - a formal description of final goal - in this sense. And then an entropy gradient is what you have when some system starts with the kind of asymmetry which represents some more ordered state - a state that could be far more messed up if allowed to evolve in time.

But entropy becomes a confusing word because we have got so use to counting systems in terms of information - local degrees of freedom or microstates. So it can also come to sound like we are talking about the constitutional events - the material and efficient causes - rather that the qualitative macrostate which is a state of global symmetry.

Also consider a model of an entropic potential - a ball resting on top of a dome. Under classical mechanics, the puzzle is the ball is at rest and so should never have reason to roll off the dome. So there is an entropic gradient - a different position for the ball that would lower its potential energy (and release waste heat and noise in the process). But the ball seems stuck forever.

Models of spontaneous symmetry breaking have to introduce a material efficient cause to break the symmetry. There must be "a fluctuation" that disturbs the ball enough that slope and gravity take over.
Then the ball rolls until it falls off the dome and reestablishes a state of symmetry - sitting still with all forces in equilibrium.

So the formal and final causes of the ball and dome describe the shape of the situation which creates a potential asymmetry, and then the desire for the second law to be fulfilled in a way that a more stable state of symmetry is achieved. And to get the ball rolling takes this rather ill-defined idea of "the inevitability of some tiny triggering push".

Of course quantum mechanics now says noisy fluctuations are an irreducible aspect of reality, so this is not such a metaphysical problem. But it does also say that material/efficient cause - the initiating event - is the least remarkable aspect of a story of symmetry-breaking processes. The fluctuation that seems to determine everything, is really just noise that can't in the end be completely suppressed.

I guess I took that to mean better technology to correct the problem. — schopenhauer1

We have plenty of sustainable technology. We lack the social organisation to make the change.

So the life-long process of limiting the contents of human consciousness (for reassurance and comfort to avoid panic overload) is natural and "healthy"...what does that say about our state of affairs? — darthbarracuda

The problem with the Romantic model of human psychology is that it is pathological rather than scientifically valid. The argument starts and stops with the facts.

Also, you seem to assume the trope by intellectual-types that humans need to exist for the X-reason of discovery and novel technology. — schopenhauer1

This is yet another example of how you project on to my arguments things I've never said.

If you want a tentative metaphysical principle, then I'd offer mine to be that the universe evolves surrounding constraints that emerge from Scarcity and the subsequent Fatigue (or Entropy). And, as Zapffe pointed out, as we scale "up" in awareness, so do we scale up in Concerns. So the unconscious rock has no Concerns, the lizard has a few Concerns occupying its day-to-day life, and the human being has a surplus of awareness that allows him to hold a surplus of Concerns, notably that of meaning.

According to Zapffe, the utter lack of meaning, means that we have to find ways to deal with this void of Concern. So we isolate, distract, attach, or sublimate ourselves to avoid panic. Suicide, then, is a natural death from spiritual causes. — darthbarracuda

Sure, I agree in a way about your story of an ever-escalating capacity for "concerns". But that is also baking in the very helplessness that you claim to derive as the conclusion of your argument.

So in my view, the concerns expand in concert with the value that is returned. Pragmatism in a nutshell. Properly organised concern - adaptive concern - is not open-ended in its agonising. Instead it is self-limiting because it builds in its own proper level of indifference. We don't seek control over what we can't control.

This is the big difference. We both agree that reality can't be controlled in a cosmic sense. But the pessimist then fetishises that as an open-ended source of agony. The pragmatist says that is the way things are - and it really doesn't matter. The whole point of widening the scope of concern is to take control of what can be controlled. So focusing on what can be done, rather than what cannot be done, is the psychologically healthy and natural approach.

The bottom line with any of the higher spiritual teachings, is that what the aspirant finds through them, is better than sex, money, fame, wealth, or any of the other seeming goods that most people spend their lives pursuing. So that is not simply indifference for its own sake, but putting aside something lesser for something greater. — Wayfarer

I agree that it is about connecting with something "higher", but then the question becomes whether this is your transcendent spirit or my immanent nature...

The basic difference is that you can do something about the suffering-as-a-mental-state but you have limited to no control over its causes. For example, we can't have a life that is ever free of diseases, death, stress-inducing events, etc. but we can somehow control how we react to these situations. — OglopTo

...and so here is where I question the very idea of wanting to control such things. Life without a struggle, without hardship, may not be life at all.

If the higher principle that would give our lives a meaningful context is immanent nature, then that embodies the principle one would aim to ultimately respect.

The egocentric response I'm am criticising in Pessimism or Nihilism is that it treats the (mythical) self as the ground of being. And I agree that is hard to avoid - in a modern culture which is hellbent on producing that very thing of the self-conscious, egocentric, human individual. But then philosophically, it is that egocentrism which is false.

Now again, there are the two ways to escape such egocentricism. Wayfarer speaks for the value of making a connection to a spiritual level of being. I would speak instead for a realism of nature - an ecological level of personal equilibration. It feels right that if society as a whole were founded on sustainable principles, then everyone would live much more happily as a result.

And yes, having any personal influence on society in this fashion feels like an impossible task. It is a Romantic vision as things stand. Which is why my response is to take the analysis a further step and consider how the current consumerist/neoliberal settings of the world are entirely natural as a response to a cosmic desire to burn off an unnaturally large store of buried fossil fuels.

From this perspective, things really are shit for humans. We have a biopsychology (a biology that includes all our general social organisation settings) that was adapted to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, but it is a biopsychology that is quite poorly adapted to the entropic explosion that is the modern industrial era.

So we can point to a source of suffering which is new and imposed upon us as modern humans. But what is then the proper response - throwing up your hands and whining with learned helplessness, or treating it as a really big speedbump in the human story? We need to find a better adaptive balance - or indeed suffer a mass extinction event around 2050.

So I don't deny something is deeply out of kilter right now. But it is not a cosmic wrong. It is just a question whether we have the resources to make an adaptive shift back to some better biopsychological balance as a species. It is a local spot of bother that one way or another can't last too much longer without some form of drastic self-correction.

On the larger/metaphysical perspective, maybe the presence of causes-of-suffering and the fact that we are forced to experience them, is also a signal that there's something transcendental/wrong about the very nature of human life itself. — OglopTo

I'm arguing the wrongness is immanent and natural, not transcendent and spiritual. But of course, in stressing the biopsychology, the two are not so far apart in terms of life practices, life advice, because both would be talking about what it is to be a mind in the world.

I think darthbarracuda was trying to explain that the FACT that suffering EXISTS to be figured out is a tragedy in itself. — schopenhauer1

Yeah. And it is this egocentric one-noteism that I say is so tedious and overwrought.

To talk about a feeling existing in this fashion simply ignores all metaphysical sophistication about the very question of the nature of "existence".

Does suffering "exist" really? I know my suffering is part of my experience. But to then elevate that to the level of a cosmological fact - a fundamental feature of reality that is solipsistically present, and so supposedly could have been absent - is just a wild exaggeration.

It is hard to take seriously for a minute any argument that begins with such a bum ontological basis.

An entirely symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically, foreclosing any sort of self-organizing capacities. The exact source(s) of cosmic asymmetry are hotly debated, but it's these asymmetries which account for self-organizing tendencies which do not violate the second law. — StreetlightX

I suppose the (I guess we must think universal?) operation of entropy is itself the most basic asymmetry, since it would seem to produce temporal directionality. You say that a symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically.Thinking about this the question that comes to mind is whether in an absolutely homogeneous, that is absolutely symmetrical, universe any dissipation of energy would occur at all. — John

SX makes the critical points very nicely. I will add a few thoughts.

The baseline state of the Universe was set up by the symmetry breaking that was the hot Big Bang. The Universe started out as a simple spreading/cooling bath of radiation. So from one perspective, it was an entropic gradient - the Universe was running down the hill from the Planck temperature towards absolute zero. But then because the Universe was effectively its own heat sink - it cooled by metric expansion - you could say that this creation of "new space" was a matching negentropic order.

So from a global perspective - one that counts degrees of freedom or microstates - it is difficult to say the entropy count actually changes. The essential change - the symmetry breaking represented by the Big Bang - already created a maximum entropy state. The radiative contents were already as messy as they could be. The now locked in story of a constant c rate radiative expansion and cooling had been "paid for" in terms of the phase transition that resulted in such a world with its orderly Planck scale structure and three dimensional, radiation dissipating, geometry.

So if we ask the usual question of how the Universe started in a state of high negentropy - an initial orderliness which could then be the fuel for a second law trajectory towards messiness - one answer is that the Big Bang was itself a mathematical-strength structural asymmetry just waiting to happen.

Before the Big Bang was a vagueness or quantum roil - a state of unbounded fluctuation or infinite dimensionality. There was action happening in any direction and so no actual global geometry or real dissipation. For structural reasons, limiting this wild chaos by constraining the action to a 3D heat sink - grabbing a chunk of this primal energy and spinning it into a cool/expanding fabric of radiative events - was a way to make a world. It created a realm of distinct pathways - the three dimensions that allowed powerlaw dilution of thermal action - that could then roll downhill towards a maximum separation between the complementary things of position and momentum, the container that is spacetime and the contents of this expanding box which was its gas of particles or thermalising events.

So before the Big Bang, things would (logically) have been so symmetrical as to be vague. Action was unbounded and so nothing existed to say that anything was happening in some direction. The Big Bang was then the dualised creation of the very split by which negentropy and entropy could even be distinguished. The emergence of an expanding spacetime dimensionality as the organised container was what made possible a matching story of spreading and so cooling particles or thermalising events. Structurally, it locked in a trajectory in which particles could make symmetric exchanges of energy among themselves - there was no trajectory of change at the individual level. But then emergently, statistically, the particles would find themselves behaving asymmetrically, the hotter particles always on the whole yielding to the probability they would make radiative exchanges with cooler particles.

This very simple initial universe - a spreading/cooling gas - then hit further symmetry breakings as its temperature dropped. Like a tide going out, suddenly a rocky deeper structure was exposed and rock pools of trapped negentropy formed.

The critical one was the electroweak symmetry breaking that saw the Higgs mechanism switched on and particles becoming gravitationally massive. This happened all at once at a critical temperature and so represented a sudden entropic deceleration everywhere in the Universe. There was a shift from the steady entropification rate where radiation was spreading as fast as it could - the speed of light - to a Universe where a good chunk of its hot contents was now dragging along at sub-light speed. The balance of the Universe was suddenly out of equilibrium, setting up the need (the telos) for a new level of dissipative mechanism. The Universe was spreading/cooling at a sub-optimal rate now. And so that paid for any further negentropic structure that would help it catch up, re-accelerate the entropification.

Hence stars. Mass clumped gravitationally. But then as a further twist of fate, it caught fire and started turning mass into radiation.

That then left its own negentropic residue in the form of heavy elements and rocky planets. And so afresh, you have the negentropic platform for life to emerge and add its (fantastically tiny) contribution to the universal cause.

So my point is that second law entropy thinking explains a heck of a lot. But metaphysically, we then have to recognise how entropy and negentropy are two faces of the same coin in some deep way. And rather than chasing some chicken and egg question of which comes first - the symmetry or its breaking - we need to have a story where they both co-arise in synergistic fashion from an even more primal state - the state that can be dubbed a chaos, an apeiron, a roil, a vagueness, an unbounded dimensionality of fluctuation.

But it is still the case that the Big Bang looks to represent a properly crisp symmetry breaking. That was the instant when a strictly limited dimensionality clicked into place. And from there, with spreading/cooling as a locked in story, further mathematical outcomes become a historical inevitability. Once action was confined to the point where it had highly constrained properties - once it was playing out in a world in which crisp dimensionality underwrote definite symmetries like those of translation and rotation - then the structural mathematics of those definite symmetries became an inevitable emergent fact. As the Universe cooled enough, it would have to go through the symmetry breakings that are represented by gauge symmetries or lie groups in particular, and so result in the Standard Model family of fundamental particles.

Long-term of course, all matter should be returned to pure radiation even if it has to be swept up into black holes first. At the Heat Death, following a history of sudden global decelerations and subsequent slowly catching up local re-accelerations, the Universe will get back to being a homogenous entropic equilibrium. It will become just the lingering black body fizzle of cosmic event horizon radiation.

But that of course is a steady-state fate that is itself underwritten by the new thing of dark energy or the cosmological constant. Everywhere the spatial fabric of the Universe is undergoing a further faint acceleration for some reason.

This is the reason we can now say the Universe will coast to a halt in terms of cosmic event horizons and so - in third law of thermodynamic fashion - actually arrive at a minimum entropy condition (rather than cooling endlessly). In Red Queen style, the Universe will still be expanding/cooling at c. But that will become running on the spot for event horizons as the underlying spacetime will be continuing to accelerate away at superluminal speed.

Yet while this negentropic dark energy acceleration is a further energy that makes certain the general entropic tale of the Universe is drawn to a close, it is of course now a new source of mystery. The hope is that a better understanding of the symmetry breaking that was the Big Bang will reveal how dark energy is again the negentropic flip-side of some larger entropic symmetry breaking. It must be another tiny source of order that paid for a lot of extra mess in some fashion.

So our explanatory instinct is always to try to arrange existence into a temporal order of causes and effects. If we are talking about entropy and negentropy, mess and order, spacetime and material contents, symmetries and symmetry-breakings, we want to decide which is chicken, which is egg. We want to impose a temporal linearity that conforms with our metaphysical prejudices.

But while that is indeed a useful way of looking at things, and even a true way of looking at things once a state of crisp organisation has developed, there is then a deeper way of looking at things which is dependent on seeing symmetry and symmetry-breaking as itself the two sides of one coin. As each other's dichotomous "other", each has to arise in the presence of its opposite even to be crisply actual.

Four causes thinking can get at this by treating finality as "lurking structure awaiting its inevitable expression".

Who knew that the entropic cooling/spreading of a 3D bath of radiation would have to get interrupted by a cascade of further negentropic symmetry-breakings as it passed critical temperatures? Well those breakings already lurked in the future due to the necessity of structural mathematics. The path to ultimate simplicity was always going to be a bumpy ride as it jolted over these hidden symmetry features that define the Standard Model family of particle species - all the ways that spin in particular can have a complexity, an intrinsic asymmetry, in its directions.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure we can devise ways to achieve equanimity despite the suffering. But this does not answer the question: "what is the purpose behind the inevitability of suffering?".

Pessimism says there's probably no meaning behind this suffering.
Buddhism says there's probably something more behind this suffering.
Stoicism doesn't touch on this issue.

If it helps, I'd like to distinguish that suffering in this context is not the 'mental state of suffering' but instead refers to the 'causes of the mental state of suffering' like bodily pain, work-related stress, feelings of meaninglessness, angst, dread, existential boredom, etc. The mental state can be altered but the causes remain regardless of one's philosophy. — OglopTo

OK, you are asking good questions. My naturalistic answer - from a biological understanding - is that suffering, like pleasure, is a sign of something for us. It is useful information.

So there is no cosmic meaning in the sense it matters (to any deity, any transcendent principle). But it is a necessary aspect of biological being because if you don't react with feeling to the world, you don't have any reason to do things that might change those feelings. And we evolved those feelings because they lead us to do the right kinds of things in terms of biological success.

But then you say you want to distinguish between the mental state and the worldly causes? I don't really get that.

My argument is that the feelings are evaluations of a worldly state - how we feel about social and environmental situations. So to change the state of feeling we would try to do something in terms of what we understand about their causes.

Therefore your comment - "we can devise ways to achieve equanimity despite the suffering" - seems wrongly focused in trying to ignore what we can't control, rather than instead seeking to adjust in ways our feelings are meant to indicate that change is needed.

Now this is easy with simple hurts. If I step on a sharp rock, I jump quickly off it. But it is then true for humans - having socially constructed powers of understanding - can remember all hurts long after they have physically ceased, and can imagine all hurts long before they ever might happen. So that level of knowledge may indeed be a burden, creating pain or anxiety where there is no immediate cause.

So humans have the capacity to magnify their capacity for suffering by making the contemplation of everything that could be bad or wrong a constant mental habit. That's quite obvious.

But also, isn't the obvious counter to work on that as Buddhism suggests - meditative practices to be in the moment. Or as modern positive psychology suggest, the antidote to pessimistic angst is to realise just how of a habit it really is, and how a different habit of mind might have to be learnt.

What I react to in pessimism as philosophy is that it is usually just a crap intellectual justification for a certain habit of mind. I can understand why such a pattern of thought would arise so strongly in modern culture. But it is also a self-damaging one that shouldn't be encouraged by retrospective rationalisation. Philosophy shouldn't be used to prove the way you are is the way you ought to be because that is the way reality really is. Philosophy should be a tool that might get you out of such a hole rather than a tool to dig it even deeper.

Nice ad hominem, I continue to wonder why those opposed to pessimism get all bent out of shape if pessimism really is as silly as they claim. — darthbarracuda

Being silly is a silly thing. So that would be the reason for being opposed.

But yes, personally I find the constant harping of the pessimist on these kinds of boards very annoying. Such whining is only possible from a point of material privilege.

It is quite true that the materially privileged are precisely those who will find themselves born in a world of high social expectations. The cultural message is look at everything you have got. You have less reason than anyone to go out and use that advantage to really achieve as an individual.

So to be born advantaged is also to feel caught in a particular kind of trap. And it may be apparent that the social game being played is in fact quite phony (Holden, where are you?). Existence has no intrinsic meaning, yada yada.

But from there, adopting a position of cosmic helplessness is bad analysis. If the game is wrong in your opinion, get involved in changing it. And be prepared that the thing that needs to change most is yourself - because the issues aren't cosmic at all, merely local and social.

And given these studies we can come to realize that animals are much closer to us behaviorally than we might have expected.

That's bollox. In some aspects - which can be defined - we are just scaled-up apes. In others, we are radically altered by the individuating power of language and cultural evolution.

Do you think chimps and dolphins feel pessimism? Is that an abstraction that might rule their waking lives?

In relation to this thread, I'm seeing Buddhism as falling under (1) and Pessimism under (2). I'm not sure though where to place Stoicism because as I infer from this thread, Stoicism doesn't even ask the question of meaning behind the suffering in the first place. — OglopTo

Wouldn't Buddhism generally be a form of equilbrium thinking in being a practice of ceasing to care in terms of a personal reaction and instead taking on a cosmic indifference. Stoicism would be similar.

So where I would criticise that is we shouldn't want to simply "rise above" the world in some transcendentally dispassionate fashion. Instead we should aim instead to equilbrate our feelings with the world through our actions. So we should stay part of life, and then work to negotiate towards outcomes that feel balanced - in terms of us and our cultures, us and our ecosystems. The final one of us and our cosmos is probably too disconnected to really worry about balancing in practice.

Can we care about that which we can not affect? It would only be if we were making a social decision - such as to whether to seed the universe with our idea of life (the good life!) in some fashion. Like launch a billion nano-bots to the distant stars in panspermic fashion. :)

The whole point of teleology is that there is no necessity, that is what gives us free will. We are free to choose our ends, and the means. Necessity is artificial, created, it is not natural. We, as individuals, historically have created a sense of what's needed, food, shelter, etc. From this we develop a communal necessity, morality, laws, and eventually a logical necessity. Logical necessity is derived from this need, what is desired for a purpose, and this need is chosen. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this seems right to you because of your ontological commitments. You are thinking in terms of directed outcomes - action that is the result of a big psychic hand reaching down to control material events.

But I am talking about an ontology based on constraints. So telos is about the evolution of such constraints. It is finality that is emergent and only "pre-exists" in the sense that even a chaos of possibility has only one generic way it will wind up organised. In hindsight, nothing else could have been possible as the way to average over all the tensions to result in an action that is the most efficient path connecting a start and its end.

So yes, humans are individuated within a historically-evolved social context. We are the product of a system of constraints. We are shaped by the culture within which we have no choice about growing up.

And yet that very culture - which has historically become pretty sophisticated - encourages this new thing of "freewill". We are encouraged to believe we all start off equal, the blank pages of an unwritten novel, and our job is to ink in that exciting life story. We are invited to demonstrate our individuation by kicking against the very thing of cultural constraints.

But as you say, this carte blanche is rather misguided. We actually still do depend on a social organisation to give us a place where we can actually live and flourish. So - if you go down the rabbit-hole of romanticism/existentialism - you wind up calling inauthentic the thing you most need to exist.

So one view is based on the notion that a positive form of freedom is what results from breaking free of all social and material constraints.

The other view says that is simply a recipe for chaos or vagueness. It is the evolution of constraints that are responsible for powerfully shaped degrees of freedom. To remove those constraints results in psychic collapse. You can't make definite choices unless you exist within a sharply definite reference frame - one that includes purposeful directions that you can either then go with, or act against, as a further locally individuated fact.

One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. — StreetlightX

I meant to add that there is also Stan Salthe's hierarchical approach to a definition here that recognises various grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful.

Salthe offers the stepping stones of {teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}. Or in more regular language,
{propensity {function {purpose}}}.

See for instance: http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/189/284

So rather than getting stuck in an either/or argument, a hierarchical definition says that the whole of existence is teleological in a generic (and quite dilute) sense. And then a strong version of teleology is what arises intensionally - immanently within the generic condition - via semiosis, or the growth of reasonableness in complex systems.

Stoic equanimity works well in the classroom and the textbook. Out in the real world, not so much. The fact that we have to limit (balance) ourselves means there is a problem that must be resolved. — darthbarracuda

Again, this simply repeats your metaphysical presumptions - the very thing I question.

Your foundational view of reality is that existence must be based on some solid ground of some kind - something that is the opposite of the dynamism or contingency we see in the world itself.

But I take the other view where the foundation of existence is instead dynamical freedom - Hericlitean flux. All is chaos until it is stabilised. And so balance - a state of dynamical equilibrium - is how the stability of things arises.

These are diametrically opposed ontologies. So where you would expect something to be the monistic solid foundation for existence - like pain or suffering - I would instead expect a dynamical balance to be that "solid foundation" for what persists. I take chaotic flux to be the unbounded "ground", and stable balance to be the emergent basis of "a world".

So given that dynamical ontology, it is not a problem that we would seek balance. The only problem is that in the "real world" - that is life as rich westerners live it in the 2010s - might be a radically out-of-equilbrium biological lifestyle.

So the point of philosophy is to be able to put a finger on what is actually wrong (if it is indeed wrong) in terms of a common culture. And not to conflate some bad social design with a metaphysical verity about the foundational condition of existence.

Equanimity is artificial, contrived. It's forced into existence and held into existence by the sheer will of the psyche - I will be virtuous, I will not descend into panic, I will kick all my miseries under the rug and pretend everything is fine and ignore everyone else's tragedy, etc.

That's just rubbish. I've already said that panglossian optimism is just as fake as your universalised pessimism.

Equanimity is a natural goal because the balancing of dynamics is the only real way for existence to achieve stability and solidity of any kind.

So your response here - to protest against being expected to contribute to your own balancing by claiming cosmic helplessness - is childish. Except even children don't believe they are actually helpless.

How do you know what ideas animals have? From a harm-based perspective, we ought to assume that behaviorally-similar organisms possess similar psychological facilities. — darthbarracuda

As usual, one doesn't claim to "know things" in some sceptic-proof absolute way. One simply has made the pragmatic effort to minimise one's uncertainty about a claim. So yes, comparative psychology, and even the neuropsychology of pain responses, is something that has been closely studied.

So again, all the resources are there! We know all about this stuff, in detail, with plenty of scientific backing. People just need to read them, take them up, and digest them. — StreetlightX

Yep. But I would add two things stand in the way of a widespread understanding of four causes holism.

First, classical reductionism sells itself not just because it is simple, but because it has good immediate pay-back. If you imagine all reality to be a machine, then that is how you get good at building machines and imposing machinery in ways that control existence. There's a lot of dollars in that.

Then related to that, no-one has produced a proper mathematics of holism. There is a ton of mathematical bits and pieces, like chaos theory, tensegrity, or whatever. But no-one has boiled it all down in the way Newton boiled down the mechanics of dynamics. So building holism in the world is hard due to a lack of first principle mathematical models.

To everyone here: let's face the facts: there's two aspects of human existence: suffering and fun. If you're having a lot of fun, you usually don't care too much about suffering. And if you're suffering, you usually don't care too much for fun. — darthbarracuda

There is of course the third option of whatever lies inbetween. So it is quite wrong to construct a philosophy around a forced binary view when the reality is that most of existence is meant to be lived as a balance between two bounding extremes.

Your approach is flawed at its root.

The point about pessimism is that suffering comes naturally. We don't control our bodies, we don't control our environment, we don't control our desires as much as we wish we did. The prevention of pain by the satisfaction of concerns is the primary purpose of human existence. Whereas fun requires effort and does not come naturally. Suffering is a structural aspect of life, fun is an accidental aspect of life. — darthbarracuda

There is some truth in this, but look at how you keep needing to mention the "we" who fail to be in control. You take it for granted there is the "self" who is at the helpless centre of things, when psychology tells us such individuated being is a social construct. Animals just don't have the same ideas about life and so don't bewail the limits and efforts of being "a self" in the way you claim is so natural.

So what would be natural - in the biological sense - would be a condition of equanimity and flow. The uncertain world would be well-predicted enough for life to run smoothly on an even keel. That would be the target animals by their neurological design would be shooting for. A homeostatic balance.

But humans construct their own psychological world. And in modern life, we paradoxically have both far more, and far less, control over that construction. Modern life has a way of sorting us more sharply into winners and losers. It creates the ladders to status, success, reward, etc. But in sharpening the definition of the way to live in this fashion, by promising the greatest intensity of fun awaits at the end of the climb, it also sharpens its opposite, the consequences of failing on the climb, or even attempting to avoid being part of the social race to society's chosen destinations.

So the point of that is that we are social creatures, but are we now creatures still targeting a natural state of equanimity? And if not, why not?

Pessimism is thus just a symptom - the flipside of optimism. And both are essentially equally meaningless in a naturalistic context. Or at least, they should rightfully be passing psychological states if the long-term state of adaptedness ought to be one zeroed on smooth stoic equanimity.

If pessimism or optimism becomes a fixed state of mind, that tells of a mind that is no longer really thinking (and finding the path that points back to an even state of balance).

The point about chance in biology is that it is something life has to mechanically manufacture because it doesn't really exist in nature.

Now that is a confronting way to put it perhaps. But consider the parallel with a tossed coin or rolled die.

As humans, we can imagine this Platonic thing of pure or crisp chance. Following the laws of thought, we can imagine reality being divided in a digital or binary fashion into a definite set of possibilities that then either definitely happen or definitely don't happen.

And then we can produce physical models of such absolute chance. We can really go to town to machine a flat disk so that it has an insignificant degree of asymmetry to bias any fair toss. We can really go to town to produce a perfect cube, with rounded corners, so that it to will have only inconsequential levels of bias when rolled on a flat surface.

So the physical world is analog. But we can make digital devices. Or at least we can approach our Platonic notion of absolute chance so closely as not to make any practical difference, given our purposes - which can be using chance to gamble, or chance to decide who serves first, or whatever.

So the point is that a world with digital perfection of this kind - a perfect symmetry of an outcome-generating process that removes any predictability from some assignable cause - does not exist normally in the world. It has to be made. And to get made implies someone with an interest in that happening. It is already a purposeful act to arrange reality so as to produce chancy outcomes.

We think of natural systems being intrinsically chancy. So a tornado could take any path, a thunderstorm could pop up anywhere. But this is vague chance, or analog chance. Yes, there is unpredictability, But it is just as mixed with inevitability. In hindsight, the thunderstorm had to happen the way it did because so many confluent events panned out that way. However there is not the sharp binary consequence that is taking one path and not another. Instead there was an infinity of trajectories - and most of them were bunched together in the way described by a chaotic attractor. So you have this muddy form of chance, this analog chance, where generally things pan out in a certain direction, and the finer detail of what happens doesn't make much difference.

With life however, it was all about sharpening up muddy chance into sharp chance. The genetic mechanism separated aspects of structure so they became discrete traits. You could take bits of the whole and ask whether going in direction A or B was the better binary choice.

So life always was about the evolution of evolvability. Life arose out of the analog organic soup by being able to pose digitally crisp questions. Intelligibility in a logical sense was the big move.

And its more than just about DNA. Bacteria have unfocused sexual lives. They can share genes at any time across different species. But multicellular life developed a more binary approach to sex. You eventually get individual acts of breeding where sharp mating choices are being made. It now becomes an either/or fact of history whether A mated with B, rather than C, D or E.

So a simplistic ontology of life does stress that what is different is that evolution is ruled by chance. It is a story of the blind watchmaker and cosmic contingency. But this is a view of chance that already presumes a digital physics - a world where absolute determinism rules, and so chance is defined in terms of there naturally always being absolute crispness about what did happen vs what didn't happen in a material sense.

But a more organic conception of reality sees it as analog or muddy when it comes to its variety. Nothing actually starts in sharp distinction. Distinctions or individuations are things that have to be developed. And to varying degrees, material individuation can arise of its own accord due to contextual factors. Yet it all remains entangled or unseparated in some degree too. A bit soupy.

Life then came along and imposed a Platonic digital rigour on this soupy organic possibilty. It framed the chemistry with cell walls, enzyme rate knobs, molecular motors, receptor pores and all other kinds of digital devices. The chemistry was organised by a tight set of yes/no paths and switches.

So developmentally, chemistry became informationally regulated. And as the flip side of this coin, the regulating information was made exposed to blind evolutionary selection. Ways were found to put as much of this digital machinery on show, out in the world for natural selection to play its part, as made sense, given the purpose of wanting adaptive plasticity to go along with the adaptive stability.

So chance - as we digitally conceive of it in its Platonically-ideal splendour - is something that life has become good at manufacturing as it is so useful. Just as life has become good at manufacturing its opposite - a regulated, homeostatic, stability. The kind of purposeful state in which strong determinism appears to rule rather than strong chance.

This is a view of the Universe that can't be seen from a classical Newtonian perspective. But it is the thermodynamic view of a Universe that is mostly a vague entropic mess spreading and cooling its way downhill to a heat death. And out of this sludge, life arises by a negentropic dichotomy. It divides the sludge into a more regulated aspect, and a more chancy aspect. It creates a new, more mechanical, level of self-interaction that makes the sludge both more self-organised, and less self-directed, than was the case.

So the "paradox" is that life seems both more purposeful and more chancy than the world it arises in. For monistic thinkers, this creates a deep problem. Life as a phenomenon ought to be reduced to one of these two ontic categories - necessary or contingent, determined or random, cosmically inevitable or cosmically accidental.

But a systems approach to existence says instead that reality is triadic. It always has this extra dimension which is the developmental one of the vague~crisp. The laws of thought, with their insistence on classical binary possibilities, is just one end of this spectrum - the crisply developed limit. And so our logic has to be larger. It must include the more radical kind of ground that is the muddy analog swamp out of which crisp counter-factually has to emerge.

And it is this triadicy which explains why there are always the dichotomies. For life to be more self-determining, it had to also be more deliberately chancy. It had to go in opposite directions within itself as a material phenomenon to break away from the entropic muddiness that was its initial conditions.

That is why theoretical biologists like Rosen break life down into the dichotomy of metabolism and replication, why they talk about the centrality of the epistemic cut. It is not about which came first - the development or the evolution, the metabolic processes or the genetic regulation. The first thing to happen is the division itself - the division that sets deterministic development and chancy evolution apart.

StreetlightX appears to desire confusing the issue through equivocation, first using "chance" in my way, in one post, then using it in the other way in the following post. Failing to properly distinguish these two uses of "chance" only propagates the myth of chance, through the apparent contradiction that something with an "absence of design or discoverable cause", is also caused. This allows those who support "chance" to argue that there is no design or discoverable cause behind things such as some specific mutations, yet these things are still caused. Does this indicate that there is a belief within the scientific community that there are causes which are undiscoverable? What type of causes would these be, final causes? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. There is an issue here as SX is promoting a reductionist paradigm - one that is antithetical to the reality of formal/final cause. So what he says is a good way to think about it from that particular view, but a holist would want a fuller view of "chance".

So for example, where SX wants to treat peppered moths and the soot blackened trees of the industrial revolution as a kind of contextual accident - a contingent fact - I would instead see it as a global constraint and so a source of teleomatic necessitation.

Predators have eyes because they need to eat. Prey has camouflage as they need to hide. This is the relationship that captures to necessary aspect when it comes to evolutionary causality. There are real desires in play. Then changes in the wider world that are unpredictable from that point of view are contingent in a sense, but not in the sense that the relationship itself is already developed to a point where it must track any such change.

So SX focuses on the contingency of the situation. But there is also another view that can be developed by focusing in the necessity and teleology involved.

But even so, SX is right in drawing out how chance and determinism are not cleanly separated in the way most people imagine from, for example, mechanics. Really, they are two ends of a spectrum - a spectrum which I, as a holist, would describe as the difference between the strongly constrained (the most mechanic) and the weakly constrained (the most randomly free).

For example, one naturalistic way of talking about this is common cause vs special cause....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cause_and_special_cause_(statistics)

The causes of things going in some direction might be strongly identifiable - a strong constraint or special cause. The tree fell because the axeman chopped away at the base. Conversely, the causes might be due to "noise" or random fluctuation. This is saying that the small things that can't be constrained, or prevented happening, can accumulate in a way that makes a difference. A tree might get so rotten that any breeze at any moment becomes the fluctuation that proves its final straw.

So there is always some event that "is the triggering cause". And yet there is a spectrum that runs from the highly purposeful kind of directed action - the woodsman - to the highly unconstrained and unpredictable outcome that is a rotten tree suddenly giving way.

And so overlaying this apparent tale of efficient cause determinism is a counter-tale - a teleological tale - of a well-formed state of desire (the woodsman) vs a well-formed state of indifference (the decay). The holist view presumes there is always a well-formed state of teleology of some kind. And indifference is marked by the point where a system ceases to care about the detail. Desire just has no reason to control events beyond the limits of having its desires generally serviced. Noise is defined by the fact it can be safely ignored.

This constraints-based view of chance makes better sense of the proven evolvability of evolution. Chance is noise and the degree of noise is something the biology gets to define for itself. It wants a useful level. And what counts as a useful level can depend on things that biology learns over time.

Pure chance for biology would be noise or fluctuations so extreme that biology could not survive. On the whole, biology knows that every next generation is going to need eyes, legs, guts - a standard complement of organs. So mutation is restricted accordingly. It is scaled so that height, weight - developmental trajectories in general - shoot for an average and thus result in tightly limited Gaussian bell-curve variety. A purer (less constrained) form of chance would be log/log or powerlaw, not normal/normal or bell curve.

So chance in nature is in fact a really complex subject. But the use of theory of truth concepts - contingent vs necessary truths - does fit with this contrast between free noise as a cause of events, and constrained action as a cause of events. Things can happen either because of probabilistic inevitability, or because of orderly direction.

But biology is then deeply teleological in attempting to suppress noise - as much as necessary to ensure the regularity of development - and equally, to harness noise, as much as necessary to ensure the production of evolution's requisite variety.

Most natural processes, like soil erosion or weather patterns, don't have this kind of choice - to either suppress or harness noisy chance. But biology is all about about this duality of desires - the duality of metabolism and replication, or developmental regularity vs evolutionary variety.

Classical Darwinism focuses on the one at the expense of the other. Blind contingency is said to explain biological complexity because the harnessing of genomic noise is what evolvability is about. However the importance of developmental regularity is now much better understood, no longer taken for granted. And so the suppression of noise is likewise seen to be at the root of biological complexity.

And the ability to arbitrate between plasticity and stability in this fashion is then the further thing that makes for a real model of biological complexity. It shows that chance or noise isn't just shit that happens for life. As much as it can afford to, life is about setting the levels of chance that can be either welcomed or tolerated. Chance for life is framed by its own historically-emergent purpose. And to point out that the future is always still irreducibly chancy does not mean that a considerable measure of finality is not in play.

... but regardless of how objective we try to be, we are still fielding a value assertion according to an accepted standard of measure. Who fields the assertion and who fields the value assertions? — Mayor of Simpleton

The point remains that our naming has the choice of either striving to talk about reality in a mind independent fashion, or in a fashion that is unabashedly subjective and seen from the point of view of our own interests.

So there are polar choices to be made. And we don't have to treat one as being then right, the other wrong. It is just important that there is this basic conflict in naming things - which then becomes a source of paradox if it is philosophically skated over, after the fashion of the OP.

So what's the answer? Was Pluto never a planet, or is being a planet not reducible to having material characteristics A, B, and C? — Michael

Again, it is the assumption that real things get reduced to lists of material particulars that causes the confusion.

If material properties are important to the form of some thing, then the formal properties will be the constraint that ensures the right materials are being used.

Is it necessary from a natural perspective that a planet is made of rock and not frozen gas? Well not if gravitationally compact and fluidly spherical are deemed key aspects of specifying "a planet" in naturalistic terms.

And gravity and spherical are formal properties, rather than material properties, in a physical description (even if folk still tend to think of gravity as a "material force" rather than spatiotemporal geometry).

Is there a difference between being a planet and being called a planet? — Mayor of Simpleton

To be a planet would be to talk about the natural process that "makes planetary objects". So we could narrow that to gravitationally produced lumps of heavy matter that are large enough/fluid enough to assume a gravitationally spherical shape (but not so large that they then collapse into black holes).

So if science is trying to decide if something is "really a planet", it would have to be a judgement in light of some theory that defines a natural process.

But humans then can add their own interests to a definition. Is it a planet if it is a gas giant with no where solid to land? Is it a planet if it is so small that you can walk around it too quickly, and it lacks enough gravity to hold you down properly? Is it a planet if it doesn't orbit a sun, but instead either wanders or perhaps is a moon that orbits a planet?

So naming always has this dual aspect - our attempts to speak of the world objectively, and then the degree to which we really want to work our own personal perspective into the naming of things.

I happen to be a composition-as-identity theorist, so whatever Pluto is, I see as dependent on every single part of whatever is seen as Pluto. A single change, changes the identity of Pluto from Pluto1.0 to Pluto1.1, for example. — darthbarracuda

But this is a bad way of thinking about identity because it only names particular states of being, not general states of being. It is far too restrictive a form of classification for the act of naming to be informationally efficient.

Naming seeks to strike a balance between generality and particularity. You want to be able to point to the things you have in mind with the least communicative effort. So if you talk about "my cat", you don't want to have to talk about the great amount of molecular turnover that goes on so that my cat is - even a few seconds ago - was a materially different cat.

So your take on naming is based on the ontic commitments of a mechanist/reductionist view of things. You implicitly take stability for granted, making even the slightest change as something that could be rightfully named. It is presumed there are stable parts which have a particulate claim to identity. The world is a composite of such material/efficient causal particulars.

But a naturalistic metaphysics instead sees reality in terms of balances of plasticity and stability. And flux or change is basic if anything - when we are talking about the material causes or being, the constituting degrees of freedom.

So that is why - in a process or systems view - it makes more sense to focus on formal/final cause as the source of object/process/structure identity. We want to name whatever it is that maintains a consistent identity through time and can either weather change, or indeed, actively maintain a state of identity.

I guess the contrast here is between composition-as-identity theory and constraint-as-identity theory. ;)

What is it that names name? It's not normally the material but the form. So you have created a misdirection in appearing to be talking about the material causes of Pluto - it's degrees of freedom - rather than its formal causes, or its informational constraints.

Then when it comes to the formal properties, we would need to make a further distinction between the natural form (what constitutes "a planet" as a naturally self-organising object/structure/process) and the human classification of forms (which can pick out natural form, but also picks out aspects of our own human scale interests).

So their are mountains, hills and molehills. As tectonic processes, they may have very similar formal causes. But in terms of reflecting the further thing of our human scale interests, there is an extra weight of information that a name would refer to.

The simplest definition would be a common place for free exchanges.

So traffic is different in that while it is an emergent effect of many individual actions, it is not itself a common good, nor are the exchanges particularly volitional. Traffic is something to be avoided, or at least managed in the common interests to minimise the need for the negotiated interactions (like which side of the road to drive on).

And of course the social benefits of free markets is something that the "free marketeers" like to claim for the right. Which is a little ironic.

What makes a fair marketplace is strong regulation - whatever it takes to remove barriers to informed action in the marketplace. The alternative is the rigged market or unlevel playing field. :)

... do they think about justice, virtue, knowledge, souls, angels, God, the infinite, mind itself? Can they understand, judge and reason?), then I haven't seen it. If someone else has, please list that evidence. — anonymous66

You can't think like that without the grammatical structuring of human language. So evidence that animals can't master grammar is enough to bolster the strong case they don't think this way - based on the wider fact that there is no behavioural evidence they do think this way.

You also have evidence from humans who have never learnt grammatical language - like the Victorian deaf-mutes who were considered brain-damaged and animal like. Of course, as soon as the deaf have a access to signing - a fully grammatical language - then the think just as well as everyone else.

So given you seem to be involved in some religious argument, it seems sensible to concede a discontinuity between humans and animals on this basis - grammatical language capability. Humans are intellectualising for this biologically-based reason. And not because they are God's creatures partaking of the divine nous, or whatever.

I'm hardly against the fruits of romanticism. I have the misspent youth to prove that. :)

So my argument is the dichotomising one. There are two parts to living - the rationalising and the experiencing, or however we choose to term it. And both matter to us. And it is recognising their essential difference that would let us do both well.

My beef with romanticism is when it is treated as a model of rational things - in particular, a model of human psychology or society.

And so for instance, psychology focused on the development of mental habits, sociology on the development of cultural ones. But romanticism then focuses on the individual's reactions in the instant - especially those that are the highest in novelty and sensation and reaction. So it puts the non-habitual in first place and rails against the constraint on freedom that is either intellectual or cultural habit.

So we have quite dichotomous ultimate targets of explanation when romanticism enters the arena of metaphysics. It seems obvious to the romantic that the real thing of intense emotion and free evaluation are what the dry old sticks are missing. The romantic then tries to establish a metaphysics of unconstrained feelings. The talk becomes all about poetry and intuition and other "freely creative ways of intellectualising".

Well I guess you can have that other brand of philosophy if it does you good. But I just prefer to experience life and art and girls, or whatever. And I certainly don't see any reason to think that romanticism offers the correct analytical framework for when it comes to doing the job of rationalising about things.

The Peircean point is that it is pointing back to the generative chaos rather than forward to the emergence of regulative habit. It is regressive rather than progressive as metaphysics. It is only progressive in the context of battling Scientism - reminding the reductionists there is more to life. But a holist already knows that.

That is exactly what I mean when I say you're redacting out some aspects of their thinking, so as to incorporate the aspects of it are useful for your approach. — Wayfarer

But it's not me who is trying to pin a single reading on what Peirce, Hegel or Aristotle "really meant" as if they were my spokesmen or my authorities.

I'm quite happy with the fact they were all complex thinkers whose own views evolved considerably over their lifetimes and so involve views that were in contradiction, or even - in my view - quite off the mark. at times.

Furthermore, Peirce was different as a philosopher in having a scientific attitude to his speculative cosmology. So the changes in his approaches can be viewed as a series of goes at striking upon the right formulation - one that would actually result in testable outcomes. In rejecting Newton's mechanical paradigm, he actually started proposing ways of checking to see if the geometry of the Universe was flat rather curved.

TL Short in What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism? 2010, makes the argument that his use of the term objective idealism marks only a phase in his thinking - one of his goes at making a developmental cosmology work. He tried it for a few years and moved on.

Now that is probably too strong. But I think we have to really examine the technicalities of Peirce's conjectures rather than simply flourish the comments where Peirce sounds enthusiastic about Emerson (a family friend) and Schelling.

Key here is Gaudiano's summary of the contrast between a materialistic and idealistic ontology...

(B) the psychical law as derived and special, the physical law alone as
primordial, which is materialism; or,

(C) the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone as
primordial, which is idealism. (EP1 292).

So as I say, Peirce tried to account for the cosmos in terms of "psychical law". And by that, he doesn't mean the application of some theistic or dualistic notion of mind, spirit or soul. He actually means the current psychology of his day. Remember that he was close to James. And he himself did foundational work in the application of the scientific method to psychological research.

(On Small Differences in Sensation. By Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow (1885) http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm)

If you google for the link to Short's paper, What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?, you can see the rather science-informed description of "the mind" that Peirce was applying to his cosmology. And it is basically the usual constraints-based system thinking I'm always talking about. So it is my claim here that "mind" boils down to "psychical law", which boils down to what I mean by organicism or systems casuality.

So as Short notes, Peirce was talking about habit-formation as being the critical dynamical process. And this led him to taking a rather odd, probably frankly self-contradicting, approach to consciousness or attentional level mental proocessing.

So for most people - especially when they think of idealism - they think it is all about the ineffable phenomenological aspect of "being conscious". That is the basis of Cartesian dualism - the apparently inescapable fact that there is something which it is like to be me, or you, or a bat. And then when Peirce starts talking about matter being effete mind, the natural assumption is that he means - panpsychically - that material substance is some kind of very dilute or deadened version of a mental substance.

Yet Peirce talks about consciousness quite differently as Firstness (where habit is Thirdness). So consciousness is associated with the brief fluctuations that are breaks in the smooth (unconscious!) running of habits. And this leads to a reversal of what you might expect.

Peirce's idea is that the cosmos started in a chaos of fluctuations and developed then the regularity of habit. And so the character of this beginning was of the kind of vivid, but undigested, consciousness of the newborn where all is a Jamesian blooming, buzzing confusion. Conscious feeling was at its most intense because absolutely everything is a disorganised surprise. But then also it was at its most chaotic or vague because it was nothing but a flood of disorganised surprises.

So what Peirce means by mind is the steady organisation which imposes order on raw feelings, or wild fluctuation. Law is the emergence of habit. A gradual suppression or constraint on surprise because the mind comes to read events in terms of signs that it interprets. We know that the beep of a car horn or the hand on the shoulder is an understood part of a world with an order. It is another example of that category of thing.

And Peirce was also careful to say he was not talking about individual minds, but the world as if it were a mind ruled by the psychical laws that psychology was establishing. Human minds are the product of neural complexity - Peirce knew that. So his argument was that they retain a lively capacity for surprise - for the flashes of attention that is the first experience of something novel - that then allows for the continual formation of new habits.

And if you follow his analysis of protoplasm, you can see how he hopes to argue a continuity from the extreme liveliness of human material organisation, through to the self-organisation of protoplasm, and eventually towards the now minimal - effete, extinct, dead - liveliness of the cosmos itself. The cosmos that is so past lively flashes of spontaneous thought that it lives as a collection of dry mechanical habits.

Importantly, Peirce point about protoplasm was the thermodynamic one. Thermodynamics had explained existence in terms of an entropy principle. And that made negentropy - the emergence of cosmic organisation a real problem. Even worse for Peirce's developmental cosmology, this new mechanical notion of entropy said the cosmos must begin in a state of high order, and his chaos is what comes at the end in a heat death.

So Peirce was wanting to say no. The ancient's had it right with their organicism. First there was an endlessly lively chaos, then this developed constraints to produce the well organised, very habitual, cosmos we see around us today. And so Peirce foresaw what was eventually proven by Prigogine. Boltzmann's mechanical version of thermodynamics is simply the reduced and deadened version of the livelier thermodynamics of modern dissipative structure theory. And cosmologists like Layzer have been championing a developmental cosmology as a consequence.

Anyway, the point is that when Peirce speaks about a cosmic mind, he means one actually ruled by psychical law and so one in which the key fact is not the emergence of consciousness - a surplus of feeling - but instead about the constraint or suppression of that in order to produce the regularity of habits.

As Short stresses, his objective idealism focuses on the principle of generalisation. Peirce is saying that lawfulness or habits develop via the "spreading" of a confusion of sharply felt instances. Over time, the differences fall away and some commonality emerges - a conception, a schema, a category, a universal. And this comes to encode a constraint on variety. It comes to encode the top-down formal and final purpose that constitutes the being of a habit, with its regulative effect on lively spontaneity.

So you do have a very difficult bit of philosophy here. But what is clear - in my opinion - is that while it sounds like Peirce is simply doing the easy thing of making panpsychic proclamations - the Universe is made of mind stuff - you really have to pay attention to the technical detail of how he really intends to cash out his objective idealism. And there he starts to talk about mechanical/material laws vs organic/psychical laws.

So - as is the case with modern biosemiotics - he really is focused on trying to fix the shortcomings of reductionism by bringing in four causes Aristoteleanism. He is saying life and mind do show there must be more to nature than a mechanist's conception of reality as a clutter of blindly bumping lumps, a rain of atoms in a void. And psychical laws - the story of habit formation in living beings right from humans down to protoplasm - capture the essence of that.

So it is not that nature has phenomenological experience everywhere in some degree - the panpsychic position. It is that nature everywhere is organised by this common "psychical" principle of habit-formation or the universal growth in reasonableness.

You could say in this light that matter is effete mind in having gone right to the extreme of being so habitual as to be deterministic. And humans - because of their complex organisation - are instead a lively balance of feeling and habits. Humans have huge capacity for development in their own lifetimes.

After his objective idealism phase, Peirce did continue to develop his semiotics more fully, which is why I personally would describe his ultimate goal as pansemiotics. If you can drop the apparent appeals to phenomenological experience - Peirce was quite plain he was against this dualistic reading - then you are left with his emphasis on a commonality of a semiotic mechanism. It is the way that minds work - by generalising away a chaos of fluctuating feeling to arrive at the intelligible regularity of habit - which is the insight he wanted to apply to a developmental metaphysics of existence itself.

Actually it wasn't all that great from 1984 to 2000, either. [Some economic historians think that an economic restructuring starting around 1960.] — Bitter Crank

A simple explanation is that the modern economy is based on freely burning fossil fuel and other resources. And the 1950s were the era of the gushing super oil fields. It took about one barrel of oil (in terms of all cost of drilling and transporting) to produce 100 barrels to use. And this ridiculously cheap energy allowed for massive, pretty wasteful, economic expansion.

Then as the easy fields dwindled, the game changed. The production balance fell to 20 free barrels for every 1 barrel spent. Now with offshore oil, tar sands, etc, the balance is down to 10 to 1, or even 5 to 1.

So the usual economic story is the west got rich because it was creative and inventive. But an ecologist would say it was really mostly just the west gobbling up a free lunch.

Conventional oil has now peaked. The show is over there. Unconventional oil is also peaking. So if economic expansion was all about cheap energy and nothing more substantial than that, then dreams of a return to 1950s style US prosperity for all - the baby boomer experience - are dead in the water.

In a realistic world - where people listened to the 1970s limits to growth message - the market might have been allowed to speak. Global economics might have responded to the underlying reality in some useful way.

Instead the story since the 1990s has been about the financialisation of the economy. Massive asset bubbles have been created to load debt onto the unsuspecting. The pretence has been created that the future will see the constant growth of the past. And so people have hocked that future to have some cash to spend right now. Publicly-owned assets have then been transferred to private hands.

But the illusions that financialisation can spin have stopped the wheels falling off so far. And after all, peak oil means that never before in history is so much actually being pumped out of the ground. It is just that the actual profits are minimal. So if you use financial trickery to manufacture cash by manufacturing credit, the current anaemic real growth can be leveraged to look like prosperity era growth. But check the oil companies and you find they are just not even investing in new exploration.

The gloomy view is we are on the edge of Seneca's cliff.

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." - Lucius Anneaus Seneca

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind? — darthbarracuda

You mean effete mind. Or extinct mind, in Schelling's term.

But what Peirce meant by mind is another question. ;)

The psychologists say that consciousness is the essential attribute of mind; and that purpose is only a special modification. I hold that purpose, or rather, final causation, of which purpose is the conscious modification, is the essential subect of psychologists’ own studies; and that consciousness is a special, and not a universal accompaniment of mind. (7. 366).

It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist. — darthbarracuda

You realise Peirce wanted to fix Kant's dualism using Schelling's objective idealism?

Oh for the ignore option that was one of PF's advantages.

Yet although you can draw on Hegel and Pierce for elements of naturalism, I think both were actually 'romantic dualists' in some respects (at least, according to your classification, although I don't think that they would have used the terminology themselves): — Wayfarer

Yep. They both had their mushy edges being people of their times. But if we pay attention to the general logic of nature they were talking about, then we are on solid ground.

So if you go quote-mining their huge outputs, you can always pick out some plum that sounds like it speaks to romantic dualism...

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. C.S. Peirce

You say that is Peirce espousing panpsychism. I say that Peirce sought to naturalise a four cause approach in talking about a reality that could develop robust habits. And what we call physical law are the four causes in their most attentuated possible form. They are the least mind-like condition - and yet mind-like in that the causality of constraints, the globally shaping causality of formal and final cause, is what the laws represent.

Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy chiefly associated with G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.

The latter is clearly descended from the (neo)platonic conception of 'the One' in my view (albeit considerably elaborated and re-interpreted by Hegel.) — Wayfarer

Yep. I see natural philosophy as detouring through German naturphilosophie and idealism. That is why German science has produced so many of the systems thinkers.

But in the end - as a pragmatist - one takes idealism as the epistemic condition, not the ontological model. So you accept all the constraints of being in a modelling relation with the world, but then you get on with actually modelling the world in the best way possible.

Aristotle was a naturalist - many would say the first! - but he also argued for a first cause or unmoved mover, etc, which was an essential premise of his philosophy. — Wayfarer

Aristotle didn't get everything right. Parts of what he said are in contradiction with others. And most of what he did say is still understood via the heavy filtering of scholasticism, which had its own agenda to meet.

So first causes and unmoved movers are where it really breaks down. He should have stuck closer to Anaximander, the first real recorded naturalist, here.

Semiosis certainly does offer a non-reductionist account of the processes of life, but at the same time, I don't think it recognizes that behind the idea of the sign an implicit idealism. — Wayfarer

How so? Isn't the whole point of Peircean semiotics that it deliberately starts at the "mind's end" of things so as not to leave the mind out?

So we are very used to the materialist approach of starting metaphysics way over where there is just brute matter tumbling about in a dumb void. The modelling begins in a realm without any trace of purpose, or design, or meaning, or logic. And by doing that, the modelling never gives itself the means to recover what it has deliberately abandoned.

But Peirce did the opposite. He started with the intellect that was doing all the intellectualising. He began with a model of logic and of the human mental processes that underlie that. Then he did the revolutionary thing (well, Hegel tried to the same with the Science of Logic) of seeing how this account of mentality could be also the account of metaphysical being.

Peirce was also of course a top scientist of his day. He could see how evolutionary theory and thermodynamics had put formal and final cause back into the game for science in a big way.

And so he did draw the natural conclusion that intelligibility was itself the driving principle of developed existence. If you have a model of the mind, it is also going to be a model of the world, as the same generic semiotic principles describe self-organisation of any possible kind.

If Plato had been a systems thinker, his Platonia would have been populated by fractals rather than triangles, the laws of thermodynamics rather than the beauty, truth and the good. :)

There is never any point arguing against you WoD as your confused posts always do such a great job of arguing against themselves.

Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'. — John

Yep. LGU promotes a confusion here. While anyone can coin their own definitions of naturalism, there is a real history of something called natural philosophy that tries to stick to Aristotle's holistic naturalism, and so usually stands against reductionism, mechanics, and scientism.

So naturalism in this tradition is about four causes, immanence, hierarchies, organicism - all those good (pre-scholastic) Aristotelean things. And you can find it popping up all through history in various guises, but, in modern times, particularly in holism, hierarchy theory, systems science, complexity theory, second order cybernetics, semiotics, neural networks, ecology, dissipative structure theory and condensed matter physics.

A confusion is that this organic naturalism doesn't actually reject mechanical reductionism. Instead, it seeks to incorporate it as its natural "other" - organicism being true to it own dialectical reasoning in this way.

So the mechanical view is not wrong. Nature does come to regulate itself in a very simple and mechanical looking fashion. Newton's laws show how the habits of the Universe can become so strongly developed that the Universe looks to run like clockwork - until quantum mechanics comes along to show that such a mechanical determinacy, such a suppression of spontaneity, is only emergent and not fundamental.

Anyway, the reductionist view really works because it is so simple. In a nutshell, it is the view that drops formal and final cause - the universals - out of the picture, and just tells the story of things in terms of material and efficient cause. This really works from a human technological point of view, because of course we are planning to impose our own formal and final causes on nature. We are going to come up with our own desires and designs. Thus we don't need to care about what nature itself might have in mind. Scientism can rule.

But then natural philosophy is meant to be stepping back to take the full holistic view where nature itself is granted as having formal and final cause in a full physicalist sense. They are real causes and not some nominalist fiction.

Now this immanent holism then treads on the toes of theistic and transcendental metaphysics - the same dualism and romanticism that informs the (muddled) Continental conception of the world.

So natural philosophy often attracts the mystic fellow travellers. Its organicism and holism can sound rather woo, so it attracts woo lovers. It has overtones of eastern philosophy especially. And in many ways, it is very much related to eastern "hard" philosophy, especially the doctrine of dependent co-arising, scholars like Nagarjuna, schools like Kyoto. So systems thinking has mushy edges. But within modern theoretical biology (naturally), you have a rigorous and mathematical tradition.

And there, scientists like Stan Salthe (a great friend) call themselves now natural philosophers to openly distance themselves from the scientistic mainstream. Aristotelean naturalism is a banner to rally around.

So I divide the camps into three.

There is material reductionism - the mechanical philosophy of material and efficient causes.

There is romantic dualism - the claim that material reductionism can't touch formal and final cause, these being aspects of the transcendent mind/spirit/value.

And then there is the holism of naturalism - a full four causes approach where the world immanently self-organises into being in organismic fashion.

The big problem for naturalism was doing justice to the apparent dualism that divides minds and worlds, top-down formal and final causes and bottom-up material and efficient causes. That problem was solved by semiotics. Peircean semiotics shows how the world can be divided into matter and symbol, and then interact and develop as a result of its causality being divided in this very fashion.

So three ontologies. And philosophical naturalism is the hardest to understand because it is intrinsically the most complex. It is not monistic like reductionism, nor dualistic like romanticism, but triadically self-intertwined.

This is why people always complain about the opacity of Hegel and Peirce. And yet they are the metaphysicians that really thought things through in systems fashion.

I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. — mcdoodle

And there you go. You tell me you don't intend to ad hom me and then repeat the ad hom.

Again, if you dispute aspects of my interpretation, and can back it up, then that would make for an interesting discussion. Instead you just make lazy dismissals with no substance. And get annoyed because I tell you that you are being lazy.

Be honest here. Did you know that there was only one recorded fragment of Anaximander's writings before you read the Wiki page a couple of days ago? Have you read Kahn or any other of the careful critiques?

Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument. — mcdoodle

You are welcome to speak for yourself. But you insult me in saying that my position is not grounded in rational scholarship.

And to remind again, the question was: why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.

There are strong mathematical arguments that hierarchical organisation is inevitable in nature - even when contingency appears to rule that nature.

If you imagine a world of dynamical processes where those processes are free to unfold over any spatiotemporal scale, then that very uncontrolled freedom throws up the big slow global processes that become the context, the potential constraints, on the small fast local processes.

So scale randomness produces hierarchical order as a simple mathematical fact. But to know about this, I guess you have to have studied modern hierarchy theory.

(although I am a little perplexed as to exactly what you are claiming bats don't do. It started off as 'think', then changed to 'have language' and seems to now be 'speak'). — andrewk

I of course never said this was about "thinking" because that is an ambiguous term in the context of comparative cognition. Can animals problem solve or form anticipatory imagery? Of course they do.

But I'm puzzled that you seem to think talking about language capacity and speaking are two different things. You might have to explain what is going on there.

OTOH if it's just a working belief then there's no need to debate it. We all have plenty of working beliefs, but don't elevate them the status of philosophical theories. — andrewk

It's hardly just a working belief when it is the result of an understanding of the relevant scientific literature. And this is an empirical question, not really a philosophical one - although clearly it is a foundational point for the speculative metaphysics of Peircean semiosis.

I gave no indication of whether I believe that bats have language or not. What I do believe is that you don't know the answer to that question. — andrewk

I simply come at this question as a scientist, so never claim absolute knowledge of anything. I only say that considerable research supports my position as the inference to the best explanation. My working belief is that bats don't speak - and so I will be considerably surprised if you can now provide credible evidence that they do.

Are you then the first person to ever know what it is like to be a bat? — andrewk

Don't be ridiculous. If you believe bats have language, present the evidence. The research into animal language capabilities is voluminous. And it says even with all possible help from humans, they can't handle fluent grammatical construction.

What I am still left wondering is what does it mean to say that the differences of humans are 'different in kind'. So far there has not been even an attempt to define what that might mean. — andrewk

Well I did define it - the difference between hearing noises and understanding messages.