What is self-organization?
I first make a distinction between living and dead matter, because self-organization differs profoundly here. The dead matter 'becomes' (self-) organized by the four fundamental forces that govern the universe. Of course, life is also subject to these forces, but actually organizes itself beyond these forces.
If you don't want to be satisfied with the simple description contained in the term self-organization, you have to ask yourself what this self-organization is and how it works.
A functioning organization is something that works according to certain rules, and those rules are made by someone in, say, a social organization. If we assume that there is nothing and no one who has developed rules for life, then it must be life itself that has developed these rules.
In addition to these rules, there must of course be an authority that monitors compliance with the rules and corrects them if necessary.
If we don't want to think of it like a chip that's implanted, then there has to be a control mechanism.
Let's make it clear: Life has a specific organizational structure and at the same time a control authority.
That life is organized is trivial. But where is the control authority? Can a structure control itself?
To illustrate this, let us imagine a network with many nodes. And let's imagine that this network is in an exchange of energy, or let's say more generally, in an exchange of information with its environment. Since such an exchange usually runs asymmetrically, an asymmetry develops in this network over the long term, i.e. the topology of the network shows different degrees of density, it is compressed or stretched.
There, where the density is greatest, there is a higher reaction density and thus a structure or information gradient.
This can be illustrated using two networks, both of the same size, one with 100 nodes and the other with 10 nodes. If you now connect every node of one network to every node of the other network, you can see that every node of the coarse-meshed network receives 10 connections from the finer-meshed network. This means that an information gradient is created. And this has a controlling effect.
If you transfer this to life, it means that e.g. the human brain has a controlling effect due to its very high information density (see e.g. the mental influence on the body). Within the brain, this gradient acts between the neocortex and subcortex etc.
This is how 'free' will can be explained (which of course is only relatively free).
So life controls itself in the form of the development and stabilization of density concentrations at the respective stage of evolution.
If you don't want to be satisfied with the simple description contained in the term self-organization, you have to ask yourself what this self-organization is and how it works.
A functioning organization is something that works according to certain rules, and those rules are made by someone in, say, a social organization. If we assume that there is nothing and no one who has developed rules for life, then it must be life itself that has developed these rules.
In addition to these rules, there must of course be an authority that monitors compliance with the rules and corrects them if necessary.
If we don't want to think of it like a chip that's implanted, then there has to be a control mechanism.
Let's make it clear: Life has a specific organizational structure and at the same time a control authority.
That life is organized is trivial. But where is the control authority? Can a structure control itself?
To illustrate this, let us imagine a network with many nodes. And let's imagine that this network is in an exchange of energy, or let's say more generally, in an exchange of information with its environment. Since such an exchange usually runs asymmetrically, an asymmetry develops in this network over the long term, i.e. the topology of the network shows different degrees of density, it is compressed or stretched.
There, where the density is greatest, there is a higher reaction density and thus a structure or information gradient.
This can be illustrated using two networks, both of the same size, one with 100 nodes and the other with 10 nodes. If you now connect every node of one network to every node of the other network, you can see that every node of the coarse-meshed network receives 10 connections from the finer-meshed network. This means that an information gradient is created. And this has a controlling effect.
If you transfer this to life, it means that e.g. the human brain has a controlling effect due to its very high information density (see e.g. the mental influence on the body). Within the brain, this gradient acts between the neocortex and subcortex etc.
This is how 'free' will can be explained (which of course is only relatively free).
So life controls itself in the form of the development and stabilization of density concentrations at the respective stage of evolution.
Comments (77)
In physics, we can say that the information that organises material structure is just its globally emergent constraints. That is how mechanics can break it down into a description of initial conditions and boundary conditions.
In biology, the information then becomes something that is represented within an internalised modelling relation. An organism has codes to store the constraints that then bound the dissipative structure which is its body feeding off a world.
So in general, self organisation is hierarchical order. The holism of global constraints acting on local possibility. A tornado self organises as a vortex feeding off a temperature gradient. The information representing that structure is in the world as its local initial conditions and global boundary conditions.
But a wombat is an organism, with a properly informational approach to organising its entropy transactions. It can store its own information using genetic and neural codes. It has a predictive internal model of the states of organisation it want to achieve and maintain.
The difference is qualitative as it isnt just a higher density of information. It is information in the sense of a Bayesian model of the organism operating in its world.
Physical descriptions, even if intended ontologically, do not capture the specificity of life.
And it's not just about self-organization, but about how this is 'controlled'. The structural density I'm talking about is, so to speak, the inner core of life. Various attributes are ascribed to it, soul, I, spirit or - as I said - (free) will.
Of course it is, although it's not enough by itself. As @apokrisis notes, the "other organizational principles than inanimate nature" you refer to have to do with the interactions of constraints from above and below. Life has to work thermodynamically or it doesn't work at all. Every discussion of abiogenesis I've read gets down to thermodynamics eventually.
Dead matter is passive, living matter is active. This is something completely different. The question of why I don't go for a walk but read a book can only be described with thermodynamics on a very general and abstract level that doesn't really understand the specifics.
Yes. And you will note that I pointed you towards the two bodies of theory that deal with these two different, yet also connected, stories on self-organisation.
You are hand-waving when the actual specifics are readily available.
Wolfgang seems to be talking about "self-organization" in a cosmic sense, to raise the question of how living creatures could be assembled out of non-living matter. He attributes that creative & organizing ability to the "four fundamental forces that govern the universe"*1. He didn't itemize those forces, but I assume he's referring to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Those binding & repelling forces certainly have something to do with organization of matter into aggregations, but exactly how lumping & clumping results in the holistic function we call Life remains unclear.
A different life-force was recently proposed by an MIT physicist*2, but it does just the opposite of aggregating & organizing compulsions. Instead of those clumping forces, he postulates that unbinding & dis-organizing Entropy may have a role in releasing Life from bondage to lumps of matter. "Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place" Apparently, Life emerges on the cusp between rigid order and random disorder, in "dissipative structures" that exist "far from equilibrium".
As you noted, another recent approach to the Life question is Biosemiosis (biology + semiotics ; lit. life-signs). This theory proposes that organisms exchange information via "pre-lingustic" signs & symbols. It assumes that some kind of Information carriers, like symbols or codes, exist in cellular biology. And DNA is one such corporeal repository of information that seems to be encoded with algorithms to organize proteins into forms that are suitable for animation. But it omits the Frankenstein lightning-bolt jolt that magically completes the circuit to animate dead flesh --- as-if raw energy was enough to do the job. If you describe that encoded matter as "Enformed Energy" though, you combine the jolt with the data.
That's why I prefer to go back to the beginning of the whole shebang, in search of the Life-source. It's what I call, in various contexts, "Primordial Energy" or "enforming energy" or "Causal Information" or "EnFormAction". That's not a physical substance, but merely a meta-physical (not-yet-physical) Potential. As we know, a complete electrical circuit does nothing until it is charged with electric Potential --- which again is not a substance, but a statistical tendency in a particular causal direction. I can't produce tangible evidence for such a Potential to Enform, but merely philosophical conjectures, analogies & metaphors. Yet a few avant-garde scientists have been expanding on Shannon's inert Information Theory --- e.g. dynamic or causal EnFormAction --- in order to explain such scientific & philosophical mysteries as Life & Mind.
In physicist Paul Davies 1989 book, The Cosmic Blueprint, he says "a completely new view of nature is emerging which recognizes that many phenomena fall outside the conventional framework". Yet he discusses several conventional candidates for causing self-organization. "The simplest type of self-organization in physics is a phase transition". Indeed a change of physical phase is an instance of almost instantaneous re-organization of a substance, such as H2O to water to gas to ice. And it might serve as a model for phase transition from protein cell to living organism to thinking thing. But by itself, it omits the enlivening force that causes such a major organizational leap.
Davies discusses many of the items considered by previous theories : fundamental forces, dissipative forces, cellular codes, and such. But he finally comes down to one key feature of those candidates : Disequilibrium*3, which is not a physical thing, but a relationship between things. We find that causal imbalance in all kinds of changes & transitions from Thermodynamics to Information Asymmetry. In my thesis I sometimes call that state of precarious tipping-point Potential : Platonic First Cause or Aristotelian Prime Mover. But in more technical terms, it could be called "Primordial Energy", or "Vacuum Energy", or simply "the generic power to transform & enform". :smile:
*1. The Four Fundamental Forces :
They understand that there are four fundamental forces gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces that are responsible for shaping the universe we inhabit.
https://universe.nasa.gov/universe/forces/
*2. A New Physics Theory of Life :
An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/
*3. Davies on Self Organization :
"Disequilibrium, claims Prigogine, is the source of order in the universe; it brings order out of chaos."
https://sciphilos.info/docs_pages/docs_Davies_selforgan_css.html
Bollocks. Biophysics speaks directly to the issue.
Quoting Gnomon
Right. He is talking about physical SO as dissipative structure. Just talking about it as if it is something he recently discovered. :rofl:
And you then add the woo of calling it a life force rather than an entropic principle. :roll:
Two possible answers are conceivable, each of which can be assigned to an epistemic-methodological direction:
1. The complexity of life is simply the assemblage of elements working together according to physical rules. Your collaboration is always traceable back to the individual elements. The fact that life behaves 'sensibly' in the sense that it is capable of surviving is due to the selection of random mutations.
2. Individual elements combine to form complex structures that each work differently than is justified by the properties of the individual elements. Each level of complexity yields new traits after passing through regime-changing tipping points. While physical laws are sufficient to describe 1., new categories are needed to describe 2., namely biological and biological laws that are not already expressed by physical laws.
If, for example, thermodynamics is used to describe physical processes, it must be transformed into biological categories for 2. Example: a trajectory is then not a point towards which the physical system runs, but the point itself is a biological reaction center with high information density (in the sense of structure density) that is constantly changing.
To what extent a description with physical terms makes sense here, even if they have been transformed, remains to be seen. In any case, they are no longer the original terms of thermodynamics.
It is completely different in the cultural area. There, for example, a certain social meaning is encoded in the four letters of the word love. There is a sender here, namely society, and a receiver, namely the individual.
In my opinion, Pattee makes the mistake of assigning human concepts to nature. Nature knows no meanings and therefore no semiotics. Nor does it know any information, by the way. Therefore, when I use the term information, I always add that it is actually structure. Because the term information leads to the same misunderstandings as those contained in the term biosemiotics.
This is precisely the issue that I have with this paragraph in your opening post:
Quoting Wolfgang
Quite apart from the merits of the theory that you sketch further on, the problem here is that you run with the anthropomorphic metaphor without pausing to question its applicability out of its social context.
Must there be "an authority that monitors compliance"? That's not quite true even in human societies, where social rules, most of which are informal, are largely heeded out of habit and good will stemming from mutual interest, without needing any active control and enforcement. In any case, there is no prima facie reason to extend the metaphor of social organization to systems other than human societies. In the end, you may even be right to do so, but to get to that point requires a good deal of reflection. You cannot just assume that the metaphor applies based on suggestive language alone.
Your snarky responses sound like you think Enformationism is contradictory to Biosemiotics or to Biophysics*1. But in my thesis & blog, I have referred to Biosemiosis*2 as an example of a possible information-processing mechanism in living organisms. The primary difference is that BS & BP are hypothetical mechanisms in Biology, while EnFormAction is a hypothetical organizing (enforming) process in Cosmology. So, although both are science-related philosophical theories, they are not competing against each other.
One of my favorite scientists (evolutionary biology + neuroscience), Terrence Deacon, has contributed several novel ideas that I adopted in my own philosophical theories. And he had this to say about Semotics*3 : In this essay, I argue that we ultimately need to re-ground biosemiotic theory on natural science principles and abandon the analogy with human level semiotics, except as this provides clues for guiding analysis. But, to overcome the implicit dualism still firmly entrenched in the biological sciences requires a third approach that is neither phenomenologically motivated nor based on a code analogy. Deacon apparently sees "implicit dualism" in Semiotics, whereas Enformationism postulates an Information-based Monism/Holism.
The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle*4, notes that, although Biosemiotic philosophy has been around for decades, it has not yet been generally accepted by empirical Biologists. The amateur Enformationism thesis has only been online for about 15 years, and it has not yet been accepted by professional Philosophers or Scientists. Yet, we slog on, pushing our little pet theories on an inconsequential forum of ideas.
The relevant question for Cosmology may not be amenable to empirical evidence. So we may have to get by with theoretical conjectures. Life is a late emergence in the 14 billion years of physical evolution. And materialistic physics has no place for minds & meanings. But biological beings seem to possess the non-physical quality of Agency (goal-setting & pursuing). So where did the cyphers for such emergent behaviors come from? Was the program for Life & Mind encoded in the original Singularity, or did such immaterial phenomena arise spontaneously from the Laws of Physics? If so, whence the pre-bang Laws for limiting & organizing physical evolution : innate or encoded? :smile:
*1. Biophysics : Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. ___Wikipedia
*2. Biosemiosis : Life Codes
Biology = empirical science of living matter
Semiotics = theoretical philosophy of linguistic analogies to explain how Life emerges from matter
BioSemiotics = Biology + Phenomenology
Enformationism = theoretical philosophy of cosmology to explain how Life & Mind emerge from matter, due to cosmic causes that are essentially Design (organizing) Information encoded into Causal Energy (EnFormAction). The process of Causation is traced back to a First Cause that precipitated the Big Bang. It's just a theory.
*3. Steps to a science of Biosemiotics :
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281155120_Steps_to_a_science_of_biosemiotics
*4. The Status Of Biosemiotics :
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/presentations/Biosemiotics/status_report.html
Deacon is very competent. But he also has been busily reinventing what already exists in terms of the biosemiotics + dissipative structure space of the structuralist/systems science tradition.
Quoting Gnomon
That is inaccurate.
Biosemiosis is based on the physics of dissipative structure. And dissipative structure is also the basis of cosmology. The Big Bang theory describes the Universe as a cooling-expanding structure of dissipation - a system falling into the very heat sink it is making.
So the big claim now is that it is not just thermodynamics in general that is the basis of everything. It is the specific thing of open-ended dissipative structure. And the Universe is pansemiotically a dissipative structure. The information that forms its constraints is to be found in its lightcone holographic structure. This is what the decoherence model of quantum mechanics argues. It is what you get when you add statistical mechanics to QM to create a description of a cosmos that is cooling because it is expanding, and expanding because it is cooling. Falling into its own heat sink, in short.
So the physical universe can be described in informational/entropic language. It just embodies a thermal structure doing its grand developmental thing.
Then along came life and mind as ways to use semiotic codes to organise this physical world. Genes and neurons, eventually words and numbers.
This was something new in that the information or negentropy could be stored inside an organism with a memory. It was no longer something holographically built into the lightcone structure of the Universe itself - and so as fleeting and dynamical as it gets - but instead information in the new sense of being bits stored in a model of the physical world. Life and mind could stand outside the world they modelled by being able to hide the physical informational configurations safe inside their own bodies.
It is still all about a fundamental basis in thermodynamics and dissipative structure. Life and mind pay their way in the Universe by using their stored negentropy as the intelligence that breaks down environmental stores of energy. Photosynthesis and respiration allows biology to tap sunshine and chemistry and so accelerate the cosmic entropification rate a fraction or two above what it would otherwise be if there was no planetary biofilm and just naked radiation falling on bare earth and lifeless oceans.
But this biosemiosis is obviously different in that it is an organismic kind of dissipative structure. It is dissipation plus intelligence. It is dissipation plus Bayesian reasoning and forward modelling.
A tornado is pretty lifelike in many ways. Almost wilful how it touches down and then weaves across the countryside gobbling up the warm air that sustains its vortex. But clearly it lacks actual semiotics in the sense of working off a model of its organismic self in relation to its sustaining material environment.
So reality as a whole - the entire shebang from cosmology to consciousness - can be modelled in the fundamental coin of thermodynamic theory. That is why information-entropy has become the basic metric employed by physical and mental theories. It is used in quantum theory. It is also used in Bayesian Brain theory.
But then there is this sly twist that separates thermodynamics from the purely physical or pansemiotic view, and thermodynamics with the added thing of a code, and hence an organismic modelling relation of a Iiving and mindful being with its entropic environment.
Biosemiotics still founds itself on information-entropy as the basic metric. But it then has to create suitably complex versions of these things to reflect the addition of the organismic modelling relation.
For example, entropy is understood in derived terms like free energy or exergy - the raw capacity to extract work from entropy production. Or from the informational point of view, the derived units become surprisal, ascendancy, mutual information, or whatever else speaks to the sense of meaning and significance that decides what information gets remembered and stored as habits of behaviour/models of the world.
So my point is that there is a general theory of everything emerging within science that is coming from this new holist perspective. It is about information and entropy at the naked physical level, and then uses suitably derived units to bridge the organismic gap and so allow us to model biological, neurological, sociological and technological levels of living/mindful dissipative structures.
The issues involved are precisely defined. My complaint about your enformationalism is that it lacks any such clarity in its mission. You might think you are groping the same elephant. But now there is a roomful of folk hard at work. And they found the light switch to see what they are doing.
You may cite a lot of these people. But you also claim to be offering philosophical originality. From my point of view, the genre you are working in is at best fan fiction.
You are talking about Physics, while I'm talking about Philosophy --- on a philosophy forum. That may be why we are not communicating. Physical Cosmology and Philosophical Cosmology are two sides of the same coin*1. But apparently you are not seeing my side : the non-physical metaphysical mental half of the universe that is meaningful only to rational philosophical animals, who think about ideas that are not physical things. :smile:
*1. Philosophy of Cosmology :
Cosmology deals with the physical situation that is the context in the large for human existence: the universe has such a nature that our life is possible. This means that although it is a physical science, it is of particular importance in terms of its implications for human life. . . . As recently as 1960, cosmology was widely regarded as a branch of philosophy. It has transitioned to an extremely active area of mainstream physics and astronomy,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology/
You tell yourself whatever gives you comfort. But I will continue calling bullshit on your conflationary arguments about "information".
I've discovered that any attempt to explain this to apokrisis, who retracts into a shell of denial accompanied by random ad hominem attacks, is pointless.
This is the deficiency of systems theory. Boundaries are used to distinguish what is part of the system from what is not part of the system. But there are no principles to distinguish a spatially external boundary from a spatial internal boundary, so anything which is not part of the system is generally understood as, "outside the system", or spatially external. A proper understand requires distinguishing between what is not part of the system by being across an internal boundary, from what is not part of the system by being across an external boundary.
Quoting Wayfarer
Apokrisis has directed me to enough material for me to see that Pattee's theory is hugely deficient. Interpretation of signs, or symbols, to decipher meaning, requires an agent which does the interpreting. The agent interprets through what is loosely represented in language and communication theory (Wittgenstein for example) as "rules", conventions, or something like that. Pattee provides no separation between the signs and the reader of the signs (interpreter), to allow for the separate existence of such "rules" of interpretation.
When I asked apokrisis about where the rules for interpretation of meaning might exist in Pattee's theory, the reply was that the rules for interpretation exist within the sign itself. What was implied is that the sign itself (code or whatever you want to call it) consists of all three elements, symbol, agent (interpreter), and rules for interpretation, such that the sign self-reads, and self-interprets.
Obviously, this is a false representation because it leaves no room for error, and error we see as paramount in the existence of evolution. "Error" is better understood here as subjectivity in interpretation. This is because "error" implies wrong, or incorrect, when we assume that there is a "normal way" which is supposed to be the correct way. And, the "normal way" is supported by statistics as the common way, but it is also generalized in order to produce those statistics, so as to ignore all sorts of differences (subjectivities) which don't make a difference to the purpose at hand . The idea that the common way or normal way is the "correct" way is produced by an illusion that the statistics produce an objective truth as to how the symbol ought to be interpreted. Therefore anything outside the statistical norm is seen as an "error" in interpretation.
Such error, what I would prefer to call "subjectivity", is made impossible by Pattee's representation which provides no separation between the sign and the rules for interpreting the sign. If the sign, and rules for interpreting the sign are one and the same thing, then it is impossible to stray from the rules in the act of interpreting the sign.
Apparently, something about my information-based worldview is discomfiting for you. Perhaps you feel that it denies a belief system that makes sense of the world for you. Yet, my philosophy encompasses a variety of perspectives. That's why I call it "BothAnd". It's both Realism and Idealism, both Reductionism and Holism, both Materialism and Informationism (which some may interpret as ancient Spiritualism). That doesn't mean all perspectives are true, but that the truth typically lies in the overlapping margins of Venn-diagram oppositions.
Anyway, It's not a question of comfort for me, but of making philosophical sense of Quantum Physics in terms of Information Theory. Besides, I'm in good company with several prominent philosophers and scientists. Yet, any comfort I might gain from that camaraderie is offset by the fact that they remain in the minority position among a plethora of pragmatic (and some dogmatic) Materialist scientists and philosophers, defending an outdated classical worldview.
So, I keep plugging away on this forum, refining and developing my understanding of the new directions in science, stemming from the post-classical philosophy of physics, better known as Quantum Physics. Of course, it's a free forum, so you are free to prefer the fragrance of your own deflationary BS. :joke:
Both/And Principle :
[i]*** My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
*** The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in the universe of many parts.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/physics/origins_of_information/
This is a deficiency of your knowledge of systems theory. Read Salthe. Boundaries are what systems form by symmetry breaking and dichotomies. The Big Bang Cosmos, by moving towards the opposing limits of locally cooling content and globally expanding extent, is its own self-bounding structure. It exists by falling into the heat sink it produces.
The rest of your post is just as ill informed.
Its the crackpottery. Simple enough.
I respect Pattee and have learned from him. I'm also cognizant that biosemiotics is a wide-ranging discipline accomodating divergent perspectives (that's why I linked to the Short History article, which is an overview.) It's a rich tapestry! From a reading of that article, I'm drawn to some of the European theorists, like Anton Marko:
(The dread spectre of materialism...)
Marko' view is convergent with what Thomas Nagel presents in Mind and Cosmos:
Quoting Thomas Nagel - Thoughts are Real
Yes, he has a deep understanding of the workings of biological organisms, and many clear thoughts. However, his speculative theory of biosemiotics is deficient for the reasons I described. When you study biosemiotics further, in the future, keep in mind the issue I mentioned, and now that it's been pointed out to you, it ought to become evident that it's a very real problem, indicating that biosemiotics is quite insufficient.
I agree. It seems like a mix of scientific understanding and pseudoscience that is trying to explain way too much, way too simplistically.
I read 'the physics and metaphysics of biosemiosis'. I felt the physics aspect was better than the metaphysics. I get the feeling that the philosophical analysis is subordinated to the needs of engineeering. But I don't agree that it's simplistic.
I think "pseudoscience" is an appropriate word. It is a presentation of metaphysics which does not stand up to a critical philosophical analysis because the principles are lacking. So it is presented as if it is supported by science rather than metaphysics, which it is not.
Try reading again and realising that biosemiosis doesnt talk about agents who interpret but systems of interpretance. The whole bleeding point is to understand things in terms of the irreducible holism of the triadic modelling relation.
So as usual you are flailing away at a straw man because you cant focus on the critical technical distinctions being made by a precise choice of words.
That's exactly why the theory is faulty. We know that systems of interpretance are just tools used by agents who interpret. To remove the agent (therefore subjectivity) from the interpretation, and present the interpretation as if there is an automatic objective system of interpretance, doing the job on its own, denies the reality of subjectivity within interpretation, which is really an essential aspect of interpretation.
In conclusion, biosemiosis makes interpretation into something which is inconsistent with interpretation as we know it. There is an agent (subject) who applies systems, makes judgements, and produces an interpretation which is unique to that agent (subject).
Well you are certainly right that it is only by correcting the faultiness of Cartesian dualism and its res cogitans dilemma by moving up to the triadic and hierarchical metaphysics that underpins biosemiosis that one can finally resolve that old logical quandary.
But you are still stuck in the immediate post-medieval stage of theistic thought. Even Kant and Schelling are adventures yet to be undertaken.
Kant and Schelling are for the most part consistent with theistic thinking. top-down causation of intentional acts is not consistent. The problem is that since top-down models cannot account for the reality of "self-determination", since such acts are caused in a bottom-up manner, and top-down models do not allow for the reality of bottom-up formations, these models are left to represent such constructions as the product of chance, symmetry-breaking or some such thing. Kant and Schelling represented the bottom-up as unknown rather than pretending that it could be known as top-down. This is the problem i described here:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Systems theory, which is employed exclusively as the tool of such thinking, does not have the means to properly separate the external from the internal. You represent this as a resolution, a "correcting the faultiness of Cartesian dualism", but there is no resolution at all, just the bold, unsupported claim that the same "systems" principles can be applied equally to animate as well as inanimate systems.
This directly contradicts the position of the purported founder of "general system theory", Ludwig von Bertalanffy. He very explicitly distinguished between inanimate "closed systems" which are dealt with in physics, and "open systems" which are living systems. The distinction is primary to general system theory, and very significant. These two distinct types of "systems" cannot be reduced one to the other, as you seem to think, as they are fundamentally different.
[quote=Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General system Theory (1968)]Closed and Open Systems
Conventional physics deals only with closed systems, i.e. systems which are considered to be isolated from their environment.
However, we find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.
It is only in recent years that an expansion of physics, in order to include open systems, has taken place. This theory has shed light on many obscure phenomena in physics and biology and has also led to important general conclusions of which I will mention only two.
The first is the principle of equifinality. In any closed system, the final state is unequivocally determined by the initial conditions: e.g. the motion in a planetary system where the positions of the planets at a time t are unequivocally determined by their positions at a time t°.
This is not so in open systems. Here, the same final state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways. This is what is called equifinality.
Another apparent contrast between inanimate and animate nature is what sometimes was called the violent contradiction between Lord Kelvin's degradation and Darwin's evolution, between the law of dissipation in physics and the law of evolution in biology. According to the second principle of thermodynamics, the general trend of events in physical nature is towards states of maximum disorder and levelling down of differences, with the so-called heat death of the universe as the final outlook, when all energy is degraded into evenly distributed heat of low temperature, and the world process comes to a stop. In contrast, the living world shows, in embryonic development and in evolution, a transition towards higher order, heterogeneity, and organization. But on the basis of the theory of open systems, the apparent contradiction between entropy and evolution disappears. In all irreversible processes, entropy must increase. Therefore, the change of entropy in closed systems is always positive; order is continually destroyed. In open systems, however, we have not only production of entropy due to irreversible processes, but also import of entropy which may well be negative. This is the case in the living organism which imports complex molecules high in free energy. Thus, living systems, maintaining themselves in a steady state, can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop towards states of increased order and organization. [/quote]
https://www.panarchy.org/vonbertalanffy/systems.1968.html
The significance is clear. Maintaining the true status of "open" in a biological system, requires that the system's interaction with its environment cannot be modeled as top-down causation, which is the modeling of a closed system.
You're not the only one having difficulty following the reasoning behind the emerging "Information-based worldview". But it's mainly the Quantum Physics & (post-Shannon) Information Theory that are difficult to grok, from a Matter-based perspective. The philosophical conclusions are comparatively simple. And obvious, in retrospect; once you get over the Nothingness hump.
On the Monism thread*1, said "?Gnomon I try to follow your arguments the best I can. I still don't see how nothing can become the physical universe based on formless potential". He's just as puzzled as you, but less disdainful of a concept he does not understand. So, I linked to a scientific account of the same notion that is discomfiting him : "nothingness", especially "causal nothingness".
On the surface, this article*2 by a prominent Physicist/Cosmologist*3 may sound compatible with a Materialist worldview. But as Nyquist astutely noted : "Nothing...big bang...physical universe, seems something is logically missing in that simple model.". "Nothing" does not compute in the pragmatic model of Materialism. But "nothing with potential for something" is logically necessary to explain the existence of our contingent physical reality. So, the scientist calls it by a sciency-sounding name : "Quantum Field"*4.
Apparently, that "Causal Nothingness" is the "crack" in the pot that you imagine to represent the thesis of Enformationism. Would the same concept make more sense to you, if it came from a distinguished scientist, instead of an insignificant poster on an inconsequential forum? :smile:
*1. Monism : Gnomon post 06-14-2023
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/814957
*2. Quantum nothingness might have birthed the Universe :
We can contemplate the idea of a metaphysical emptiness, a complete void where there is nothing. But these are concepts we make up, not necessarily things that exist.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/quantum-nothingness-birth-universe/
Note --- Is the Quantum Field a "metaphysical emptiness" or a physical nothingness?
*3. Marcelo Gleiser is a Brazilian physicist and astronomer. He is currently Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College ___Wiki
*4. What is a quantum field made of? :
[i]"Quantum Fields can be made of many states of waves and matter"
" Quantum fields are made up of quantum oscillators, an infinity-of-infinities of them."
" physicists tell us that at the deepest level, everything is made up of mysterious entities, fluid-like substances that we call quantum fields"
" So quantum fields aren't physical material objects they are just mathematical functions that map spacetime events to elements of a field space"[/i] ___Google search
Note --- Is a "mathematical function" --- like the quantum wave function --- a material object, or an imaginary concept (i.e. information)?
Quoting apokrisis
:fire:
You don't seem to tire of casting pearls ... Good. :smirk:
Quoting apokrisis
:sweat: Amen, brother!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, von Bertalanffy is significantly confusing cosmology the universe as a closed system with all other phenomena subsystems modelled by "conventional physics". :roll:
I have no problem at all with either the metaphysics or physics of raw potential. Your problem is I understand all this stuff well enough to see that you dont.
But the biological system is still constrained by the Second Law. It can develop local negentropy because that overall increases the global entropy of the Cosmos.
Biologys big trick is that it is open for radiation flows by becoming closed for material flows. It can transact pure sunlight because it efficiently recycles its organic matter.
So it is more open to radiation than bare earth. Rock will scatter and cool sunlight to only about 60 degrees C. A rainforest cools it to 20 degrees C. Life can extract more juice from the solar flux.
But to do this, life must efficiently recycle its material structure. And rainforests are famous for being ecologically closed to the point they manage their own rainfall and need only the thinnest soil.
So life and cosmos can both be modelled in dissipative structure terms. And when it comes to open vs closed, you have to be alert to whether you are talking radiation or matter.
The Big Bang itself has this issue. It started off as a pure adiabatic thermal flow. Just spreading-cooling radiation. But then there was a phase change due to the entanglement of local and global symmetry breakings - an interaction between local gauge fields and a global Higgs field that made fermions massive. A smoothly expanding gas became suddenly a gravitating dust. You had a separation that was a creation of negentropy that now needed to be entropified back to pure radiation.
At the cosmic level, this produced the open dissipative structures we call stars and blackholes. It is going to take a long time to turn the dust of massive particles back to the background thermal sizzle of a quantum vacuum.
Then life repeats the story at its own micro-cosmic scale. We take what the Sun is doing, mix it with the complex remnants of past super-novae which are the further negentropy that results in the crud known as a planet, and cook up a little Gaian mix or photosynthesis and respiration.
Life uses the fuel of sunlight to drive the construction of metabolically structured cells. It self-encloses for materiality so as to beat ordinary physics when it comes to the rate at which a released flow of radiation is being entropically cooled.
The concepts of open and closed are useful in this analysis. But you also then have to be able to follow the practical complexities that help us see what is really going on.
Without understanding it, Gnomon in fact posted this graph of the creation of the negentropic gap from David Layzer, the cosmologist who saw this back in the 1960s.
Is it possible that your "understanding" is out of date? Not wrong, just outmoded.
I expected posters on a philosophy forum to be well-informed about the evolution of Information Theory since Shannon's statistical definition for a specific purpose : data processing & communication. But I have been disillusioned.
Scientists now know that mathematical Information plays many roles at all levels of reality. It's no longer just inert Data ; it's also Meaning, Causation, Organization, etc. Wherever there is Mathematics or Logic, there is Information. :smile:
What is Information? :
Originally, the word information referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural networks. Now, Terrence Deacons book about the Causal Power of Absence requires another reinterpretation of the role of Information in the world. He quotes philosopher John Collier, The great tragedy of formal information theory [Shannon] is that its very expressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been designed to describe. Claude Shannons Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
Nope. The problem is you rabbit on about moddish stuff without having any technical understanding or metaphysical grounding. Thus your "thesis" amounts to nothing more than hand-waving pronouncements like this...
Quoting Gnomon
It's a shame you don't actually take time to study and understand since you seem to be so excited about what is indeed a really interesting story.
You want to hang on to the coat-tails of something while pretending to be a thought leader in it. It should be enough to just actually hang on is coat-tails and show a competence when discussing the latest developments.
This is not an accurate statement. The biological system itself, being an open system, is not constrained by the second law. The second law is not applicable to biological systems, because they are open systems, and the second law is applicable to closed systems only. That is the defining feature of the open system. All irreversible processes within the open system are understood to be subject to the second law, but the system itself is not subject to that law. In the open system there is entropy and negative entropy which is imported, therefore the system is not subject to the second law. Read the quote I provided carefully.
From observation of the open system, there is evidence that the system itself violates the second law of thermodynamics. So von Bertalanffy describes it as importation from the system's environment. If open systems are modeled as dissipative structures, then it is incorrect to say that such a system is subject to the second law. Furthermore, the means by which entropy and negative entropy are imported into the system is not necessarily known, so we cannot conclude that it must be either upward or downward causation.
Now the issue at hand is the agent which imports the negative entropy into the system, or we could simply say "the cause" of that importation. You can write this agency off to "symmetry-breaking" or some such thing, but this is nothing more than just saying that chance is a causal agent. And that is not logically sound.
Enough idiocy. A biological system is closed for its materials and open for its energy flow. It sets up the metabolic turbine that an environmental entropy gradient can spin.
That is the difference between a physical dissipative system like a tornado which is helplessly spun into being by a gradient and an organism that can intelligently construct the dissipative structure to tap an otherwise blocked entropy gradient.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Learn some biology.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Listen more carefully to what I actually say.
Life is agency in that it harnesses chance. It ratchets thermal randomness to sustain its organismic order.
The Universe wants to entropify. Life says here, let me help you over the humps. The second law gets served in the long run, but life gets to swim in negentropic loopholes it discovers.
Oxidation is a powerful natural force. So life came along and harnessed that for respiration. It even invented photosynthesis to close the material loop and use the inverse operation of fixing CO2 to
ensure the Earth's atmosphere had a stable life-supporting mix of gases.
Bacteria closed the whole planet for materials so a biofilm could live off sunlight while tightly regulating a Gaian O2~CO2 balance that also kept the planet at a steady liveable temperature.
In terms of top-down constraints and bottom-up degrees of freedom, this is a direct demonstration of the balancing act that maintains Earth as a Gaian level superorganism.
Life on Earth grows as freely as it can. But collectively it is restricted by the metabolic dichotomy that is the complementary processes of respiration and photosynthesis. The upper limit of the ecological carrying capacity is defined by a narrow range of atmospheric gases and a temperature band that keeps the Earth mostly ice free. Closed for materials in this fashion, the planetary biofilm can then maximise its entropy production in terms of turning 5600 C degree sunrays into 20 degree C infrared radiation.
So life as "agency" is about this Gaian wholeness. There is a will being expressed at the planetary scale just as much as at the local bacterial scale.
The bacteria want exactly this kind of world so that they can thrive. And the world wants exactly these kinds of little organisms ones that can both photosynthesise and respire so that such an optimised planet can continue to be the case.
Then in the larger picture, the Cosmos itself wants a planet like Earth to arrive as its Gaian self-stabilising and long run optimum.
Oxidation is the biggest bang for buck going if you are carbon chemistry. And carbon is the biggest bank for buck material if you are talking about a propensity for chemical complexity.
It would woo to suggest that the Cosmos actually has a mind, or a designer. But Darwinian evolution is the agency that ensures life did keep stumbling towards the biggest entropic combination the Cosmos had to offer.
It nearly didn't work out. When bacterial first invented photosynthesis, they produced so much O2, removed so much of the insulating atmospheric methane blanket by oxidation, that they nearly killed life as the Earth froze into a snowball. Fortunately the chemistry could be inverted and a stable dynamical balance could result. The O2 could be eaten and CO2 excreted instead.
Is this your confusion? Individual organisms might seem to answer to your simplistic definition of openness. They transact raw materials with their environments. But then the environment itself is a Gaian superorganism. Life is now woven into the material cycles of the planet itself.
Without life, Earth would not have an oxygen rich atmosphere and all its water would have boiled off due to a lack of a protective ozone layer. The chemistry of the planet wouldn't be the same.
But:
Quoting apokrisis
However:
Quoting apokrisis
Is it though? I question whether evolution is an agent at all. Natural selection acts to prevent things happening, to filter things out, but it doesn't create. The only agents involved are organisms. If anything, the attribution of agency to evolution is a remnant of theism, where now instead of the Divine Architect, agency is attributed to the process that has ostensibly replaced Him.
Maybe I should have used scare quotes. I meant it is the general top-down constraint acting to shape the upwardly constructing degrees of freedom.
So yes, it winnows variety so that all the actors in an ecosystem fit together in a mutually optimising way. But then those local actors can be creative in their resulting developmental trajectories. They can do their best to beat the odds when it come to reproducing.
So agency - if we must use the word - boils down to a capacity to make choices. Constraints create a space of such choices. Actors then react to their constrained environments by making choices - informed or otherwise.
From natures point of view, it doesnt in fact matter that organisms make particularly smart choices. It is enough for evolution that they just definitely either do one thing or its other.
If an organism chooses the wrong option, then the selection algorithm can tilt action towards the opposite choice the next time. But if responses are merely vague and confused, neither one thing nor the other, then nothing can really be learned.
Agency at its simple level is just the bacterium swimming in a straight line as it keeps moving towards the scent of food and then switching to random tumbling when it has lost the scent.
We dont have to invoke any kind of divine inner spark. Just a molecular switch that flips the spiralling flagella from entangled straight line motion to disentangled and tumbling mode.
I think we must, as we're agents. Choice doesn't come into what crystals do, but it comes into what the most basic organisms do, even if in a very simple manner. That's the sense in which life introduces new horizons of possibility.
Quoting apokrisis
Bacteria will not reflect on their situation, but we are able to do that, so it has significance for us. And the analogy is a misleading one, in that a switch has absolutely no agency, it is both constructed and operated by an external agency, whereas the choices an organism makes are determinative of its continued survival. Doesn't matter to a switch, what happens, but it matters a hell of a lot to an organism. This whole question of agency and physical causation is one of the central philosophical dilemmas. To turn over the whole question to impersonal laws, like thermodynamics or atomic physics, is in a way to dodge the question that our particular point in the evolutionary cycle has brought us to. It's to wash our hands of the responsibility we must take for our own choices.
An organism is a network of counterfactual switching. It is constructed of the very possibility to flip between polar opposites at any level of its hierarchical organisation.
Counterfactual clarity is the basis of meaningful agency. You can pick a particular direction only to the degree you can exclude all other alternatives. What you do, and what you thus dont do in any moment, are the complementary aspects of making a choice.
And it is the same dichotomistic logic down at the level of sensory receptors or enzymatic regulation. You have to be able to make a choice, and indeed not choose that in the most definite sense by doing its very opposite, to in fact have choices, and thus what we think of as creative agency or freewill.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why must we take responsibility? It is enough to suffer the consequences. You have an inflated sense of the power of the individual in a world of near eight billion people. If you want to debate the shaping hand of morality, lets get real about what really drives modern social structure. Examine political economies rather than appeal to folk to consult their conscience.
As I said earlier, trying to explain way too much, way too simplistically.
You are the one preaching idiocy. As a living, acting organism, I am a biological system. I eat my dinner, therefore this biological system is not closed for materials. Your proposed material/energy distinction is simply inapplicable here.
Quoting apokrisis
Are you preaching vitalism? That's the way you are talking, "life is agency...it ratchets...", "life says...". You have simply replaced the ancient term, "the soul" with "life", to distance yourself from theology. We could effectively replace one for the other without a change in meaning. I'm not opposed to vitalism in general, and speaking of "life" or "the soul" as this type of agency, that is how Aristotle defined "the soul". But then there is the magical thinking you employ in an attempt to make vitalism consistent with the principles of physics, such as those "negentropic loopholes it discovers". This type of magical thinking is what I am opposed to. Do you not recognize a "negentropic loophole" as nothing other than magic?
All irreversible physical processes are entropic. That means any and every temporal process is entropic. What on earth are these magical, nontemporal, "loopholes" which life has discovered. I didn't see any of that magic in Pattee's material.
Quoting apokrisis
Is the magic based in "bottom-up degrees of freedom"? Instead of portraying life as an agent which produces bottom-up constraints through a form of causation which escapes the principles of physics (which is consistent with classical vitalism), you propose magical loopholes that the soul discovers. But the magical loopholes are really nothing but mathematical sophistry, created from deficiencies in the way that mathematics deals with infinity. In other words, your boundary condition is infinite degrees of freedom, and this false boundary condition allows for the positing of magical loopholes anywhere that the system approaches the boundary.
Quoting apokrisis
This statement you made to Wayfarer is inconsistent, somewhat incoherent. Constructions are constraints. "Degrees of freedom" cannot construct. This is why there is a need for an agent which produces bottom-up constraints, in the manner of bottom-up causation. With phrases like this, it appears to me that you recognize, and clearly acknowledge (being the very intelligent person that you are), this need for constraints which are caused, and created in a bottom-up way. But this logical need interferes with your naturalist bent, so you try to sweep it under the carpet. Then you are left relying on the magical thinking of discovering "negantropic loopholes".
Quoting apokrisis
You have not shown how "the world", as an inanimate planet, you described as having an O2/CO2 Gaian balance, has taken on the magical agency of life (a soul), so that you can speak of it in terms of seeking those magical loopholes. This appears to be a huge problem in your metaphysics, you assign to life this magical power of agency (the capacity to discover negentropic loopholes), then you jump the gap to inanimate objects and assign the same magical power to them as well. Of course, that leaping of the gap is only provided for because the "negentropic loopholes" are a feature created by the mathematical axioms employed, and the same mathematics is applied to both the animate and the inanimate. This allows that the magical loopholes can be said to exist within both the animate and the inanimate. The statement that they have real existence is just a falsity though because the loopholes are a fault of the mathematical laws (the map), not the world itself (the terrain).
Quoting apokrisis
You clearly have no idea of what von Bertalanffy had in mind with the distinction between open and closed systems, therefore your understanding of general system theory is deeply flawed. Your categorizations are nothing but abuse of the theory, which makes it appear ridiculous. But the ridiculousness is not in the general system theory itself, as composed by von Bertalanffy, it is in your abusive application.
I see. My lack of authoritative credentials is a stumbling block for you. But that's why I link to people who have credentials in relevant areas. I even include a pertinent excerpt along with the link, so you don't have to read a technical webpage. I don't know what else I can do to communicate some novel ideas in science & philosophy with you. Nevertheless, I'm still willing to reply to any comments you direct to me. You know how persistent rabbits are. :smile:
PS___Despite the failure to communicate, I have enjoyed the stimulation of your goading : it forces me to trim the fat from my thesis, and get down to the meat.
This seems to be another one of those threads where posters, who are well read in certain areas of science & philosophy, end-up talking past each other from separate-but-adjacent wells-of-knowledge. Ironically, although he disparages my own unconventional worldview, a lot of what says in the vocabulary of his Biology-centric worldview, actually makes sense in terms of my own Information-centric worldview --- which goes back to a time before Biology emerged from Physics. Perhaps it's an accent thing --- like English & German languages, historically related, but we still need interpreters to facilitate communication. Here's a few quotes & notes from his post to you above :
*1. "Life is agency in that it harnesses chance".
Note --- To harness chance is to organize randomness. But natural or cosmic agency is a no-no in the accidental philosophy of Materialism. Yet, self-organization requires the ability to bring order out of chaos. However, to postulate a self-existent First Cause or uber-Agent --- who provides the Cause & Laws necessary to guide a randomized non-living system toward the emergence of living organisms --- sounds like woo-mongering to some on this forum.
*2. "The Universe wants to entropify. Life says here, let me help you over the humps. The second law gets served in the long run, but life gets to swim in negentropic loopholes it discovers."
Note --- Is this an extrapolation of the Gaian hypothesis, to assert that the natural universe is not only self-regulating, but also self-organizing, and has a Will, a Direction, a Goal, almost like a human agent? I sometimes refer to the Gaia hypothesis to illustrate how the universe functions as-if a living organism. Perhaps I don't take it as literally as he does. In place of "to entropify" I would use the term "to enform", and in place of "negentropy" I coined the term "EnFormAction". Different vocabularies for different folks.
*3. "So life as "agency" is about this Gaian wholeness."
Note --- Holism is an essential concept to explain how Generic Information changes Form via sequential Phase Transitions. And the power to transform matter into Life & Mind might pre-date or transcend the emergence of Gaia from non-living insentient matter in the Big Bang beginning. I guess it depends on just how Whole Gaia is assumed to be : encompassing even space-time?
*4. "It would woo to suggest that the Cosmos actually has a mind, or a designer. But Darwinian evolution is the agency that ensures life did keep stumbling towards the biggest entropic combination the Cosmos had to offer."
Note --- Is he implying that the mindless Darwinian mechanism functions as-if it was an intentional agent, or designer, manipulating matter & energy into living organisms, some with minds of their own? When I make similar inferences, the boo-woo-birds start squawking. Just how Holistic do you have to be to qualify as a wooer? Does Biosemiotics/Gaia hypothesis stop just short of the woo line?
*5. "Is this your confusion? Individual organisms might seem to answer to your simplistic definition of openness. They transact raw materials with their environments. But then the environment itself is a Gaian superorganism. Life is now woven into the material cycles of the planet itself."
Note --- Is a "super-organism" super-natural?
I can agree with some of those statements, but his disparaging attitude toward your & my -- not so different -- ideas indicates that he may have responded to harsh woo-bashing on this forum by withdrawing into a hard shell of doctrinaire Biosemiotics --- turning a theory into a dogma. Then wielding the woo-stick on other non-conformers. :smile:
If you were a Chinese peasant with paddy fields to manure, you would know that material recycling is what nature does.
But keep blathering away. :yawn:
Stop making excuses for yourself. It is your lack of credible analysis and understanding of the subject matter itself.
You're not making any sense apokrisis, just demonstrating that you have no understanding of the first principle of general system theory, the distinction between open systems and closed systems.
If I may... Step 1 to understanding @apokrisis is to swap the idea of "causes" for the idea of "prevents".
Whatever has happened is not what was caused to happen; it's whatever was not prevented from happening. Certainly for evolution, this ought to be obvious: variation happens wherever and to whatever degree it can, and insofar as one variation gains predominance in the next generation, to that degree there is some new constraint -- and new options -- as we go around again. Related mechanisms, which is to say, similar behaviors, can be found in other sorts of systems, without evolution's particular twist involving replication.
The gist of it is that -- particularly considering the time-scales and populations involved -- whatever can happen, will. And "can" here is glossed as "not prevented by some (generally top-down) constraint", and keeping in mind how change gets locked in, at least to some degree and at least temporarily, so we're never talking about everything conceivable happening, but only what is a genuine possibility under current conditions.
In this sense, yes indeed, degrees of freedom construct. It's their job.
(Pretty close, apo?)
Life evolved metabolic power by learning to recycle its materials and thus learn to be able to live off just sunlight and water. The ways it was either open or closed became increasingly organised to maximise the gap between its capacity for entropic throughput and its need to repair the inevitable entropy damage to its own negentropic material structure.
Everything in the body is falling apart. But you don't want to let it escape the bounds of the body if you can help it. You want to resuse it to rebuild the body again.
The opposite is the case for the entropic flow from source to sink that is then spinning the wheels of this system. You want to have a bodily structure that can suck in environmental negentropy at one end and blast it out the other as entropy. Breaking things down and shoving them back out is the flip side of the same metabolic equation.
So a dichotomy is what creates a distinction between the energy driving the machinery, and the matter constituting the machinery to be driven. The greater the division, the higher the power rating of the organism.
And the same goes for ecosystems as a whole. They have to scale up the recycling of the materials at the planetary level of biology. It becomes one big Gaian organism.
You are still stuck on page one of the thermodynamical analysis. Open vs closed in the context of the physics of steam engines hot vessels in cold sinks is just to get you going.
Yep. :up:
The systems approach is based on the four Aristotelean causes. So it dichotomises the notion of causality into two complementary types of cause. The top-down action of formal/final cause, and the bottom-up action of material/efficient cause. (Each of these causal pairs being further dichotomised as the general and particular of their kind.)
We can then talk about this more simply, more naturally, in terms of global constraints and local degrees of freedom. That is how physics itself is set up. Differential equations which encode constraints as holonomic constants and freedoms as contingent variables.
And in turn, we can get even closer to ordinary language by talking about constraint or limitation versus construction. We can see how there are two kinds of cause in that either an action is being prevented, or that action is being left free to happen.
And being free to happen, it must happen with some regularity. But then for the global constraints to survive, this free generation of local actions must also be reconstructing rather than eroding that larger world that is allowing them to exist by not ruling them out.
It is a virtuous autopoietic loop. The right kind of limiting constraints must evolve to produce the right kind of constructive actions. That is, the ones that rebuild the system of constraints in some general, statistically robust, way.
Evolution describes just this. What works is what out-reconstructs what doesn't. In the beginning, everything seems possible. But as everything starts to happen, it interacts in every possible way. This eventually selects for whatever balance of local and global causality works which has the hylomorphic order that proves stable and lasting rather than unstable and quick to perish.
So causality broadly is a unity of opposites the partnership of downward-acting constraints and upwardly-constructing degrees of freedom. The overall goal of this system's causality is to discover a persistent dynamical balance.
And so the Universe itself must exist as an evolutionary solution to this riddle of self-organised persistence. Its system of laws and particles was the one that won the Darwinian race in the metaphysical space of all possibilities.
You make some very interesting points I missed:
Quoting apokrisis
And of course they might not. Sometimes there are runaway processes and you end up with Easter Island. Thus:
Quoting apokrisis
Which might not happen in one go, because at this level in the hierarchy there is also construction and selection going on. From the lower level's point-of-view, if they erode the constraints that enabled them, they're in for a paradigm shift, as the kids say.
Quoting apokrisis
But there's only one system that's so well balanced that it's stable, right? Namely the heat death of the universe. Every system of constraints must allow slightly more freedom that it really ought to if it's to become stable, because in the very long run all such systems are temporary and must seed their own destruction. The whole purpose of these temporary solutions is to waste as much energy as possible and then fall apart, right?
But then, as Wallace Stevens observed, "Death is the mother of beauty."
Systems that fall apart too quickly to be much help burning off energy are replaced by more complex and robust systems, but on the other side of that curve there's less to work with as you slide downward toward oblivion and the systems are again less complex.
There's a sweet spot -- like how much a dissident can get past the censors, or how much an artist can challenge convention. In that zone, the whole thing produces wonders that are only possible because they are temporary.
The Universe is the stable context which is then colonised by further hierarchical levels of dissipative complexity, like stars, blackholes and biofilms.
But the Big Bang is the featureless start, and the Heat Death is the return of things to a featureless end. So it is only in the middle that the Universe can get more interesting in that it plays host to its local dissipative structures. Gravitational clumps of particles that become negentropic residues wanting to be broken down if a mechanism like fusion, Hawking radiation or redox metabolism can exist to do the job.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Thats it. We are only around as an interested party because any turbulent flow has eddies. The Higgs symmetry breaking turned a smooth flow of expanding-cooling radiation into a lumpy mix of radiation and clumping particles. Stars were turning hydrogen and helium back into simple radiation but at the expense of having to make nickel, carbon and other crud as the other half of the equation.
In the short run, on the local scale, the second law can run backwards. Its not a big deal.
OK, now to understand me, you need to recognize that "causes" cannot be adequately replaced with "prevents". This is because "causes" implies agency, an act whether its intentional or not, and the discussion of how specific acts are prevented, or allowed for, can never produce an understanding of the act itself. Therefore in ontology we ought not think that we can swap "causes" for "prevents", because the two have different meanings, and thinking that we can do this would be to misunderstand.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This provides a good example. What you describe, is how a variation gains "predominance". But this descritpiton is inadequate for understanding the cause of variation in the first place. So if one were to claim that the theory of evolution provides us with the means to understand the cause of variation, this would be an unjustifiable claim, because it only provides an explanation for how a variation gains predominance. This leads many to claim that "chance", or "random" mutations are the cause of variation in the first place.
But you should understand that "chance" and "random" are not proper causal terms. These terms represent ideas which are produced when this mode of thinking reaches the end of its applicability. We could call this the boundary conditions to that system of thinking. That mode of thinking already assumes active variation, as a given, so anytime this system of thinking approaches that boundary condition there is the appearance of endless possibility and this gets interpreted as chance, or randomness. And this is because the cause of variation itself is on the other side of the boundary condition, being taken for granted, and therefore cannot be understood in this way. Then to think that this provides an understanding of the cause of variation would be to misunderstand.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Do you agree now, that I've explained how this claim, your conclusion, "degrees of freedom construct" represents a misunderstanding. "Constructions" are artificial structures requiring intentional agents for design and production. To show how the intentional agent is restricted, or prevented in its constructive capacities, by current physical conditions, and non-physical ideas, and claim that this provides a representation of "the cause" of these constructions, is a gross misunderstanding. That is because it takes the intentional agent, which is the true "cause" of the constructions, for granted, and therefore provides absolutely no understanding of that agent. Then, since the intentional agent is on the other side of the boundary conditions for that system of understanding, it must have infinite degrees of freedom at its disposal, so its actions cannot be understood at all by that system, and therefore are represented as chance or random acts. But this is not consistent with how we understand intentional acts.
The problem here is that since the agent, as the active cause of activity is placed on the other side of the boundary conditions, it is rendered as impossible to understand by that system of thinking. Therefore, the agent in those constructions which the "degrees of freedom construct" might equally be an intentional agent, or a non-intentional agent, depending on how one moves to define the relative terms. So there is much ambiguity simply because the agent is outside the boundary conditions and therefore cannot be understood.
If we adhere to the principles of that system of thinking in a strict manner, the degrees of freedom must be represented as infinite at the boundary condition, and this is completely inconsistent with how we understand "intentional". Then we have the irresolvable problem of how a random act may "construct". The first act within the boundary, the act with the highest degree of freedom, yet not infinite freedom, is a "construct", showing the characteristics of intention. However, intention is not allowed to be outside the boundary, because that would require a type of constraint not provided for by the system of thinking. And so this system of thinking is demonstrably incapable of understanding intentional acts.
In comparison, the theistic way of thinking places intention as outside the boundary, with a transcendent intentional God. But this way of thinking implies that the constraint system of the other model is incomplete as there are necessarily bottom-up constraints (moral constraints) imposed by God.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, a one-liner about people recycling manure provides no indication that you understand the first thing about the difference between open and closed systems.
Quoting apokrisis
Do you agree with me then, that since life required both sunlight and water, biological systems are open in the sense of matter and energy. Therefore that distinction is irrelevant to this discussion, and to proceed in that direction is just a digression, diversion, or distraction.
Although the basic idea of Positive vs Negative (absential)*1 Causation makes some abstract sense, I'm not familiar with the notion of active "Prevention" in supposedly Natural processes such as Self-Organization. In complex systems, random "interference" sometimes occurs, but non-random "prevention" seems to imply an active "intervention". Which could suggest some kind of Agency. For example, most of the search items (causation vs prevention) involve medical or psychiatric interventions or omissions*2 by human doctors.
As I understand the concept of Self-Organization, the only secondary causal agency is the Self : as in "self-causation". Which hints at some non-linear potential in the original causal input : e.g. the Big Bang. By "non-linear" I mean something like the codes of a guided missile that can change course along the way to the target.
Is there another external agency, that counters the Linear momentum of the initial Cause? In billiards, the pool shooter is the First Cause, and subsequent paths of the balls are the result of momentum & direction (vector) inputs. I suppose you could say that the perimeter of the table "prevents" the balls from exploring all paths in the universe. But the table is a man-made object, constructed with intent to prevent or constrain degrees of freedom.
In the context of Big Bang theory, any subsequent exchanges of causal energy are presumably due to exchanges of momentum, which are not intentional or preventional*3. Is postulating some Active Agent*2 changing the direction of causation by intentional prevention. Or am I missing the point? :smile:
*1. Absential Causation : Terrence Deacon term
Absential ~ Causality. a form of causality dependent on specifically absent features and unrealized potentials can be compatible with our best science
https://absence.github.io/3-explanations/absential/absential.html
*2. Causation by Omission :
For example, to take fairly simple cases, 'causation' by omission involves a negative event 'causing' something, and prevention involves something 'causing' a negative event.
*3. The Philosophy of Prevention :
Prevention is an active process, prevention is a kind of practical as well as philosophical intervention.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299747527_The_Philosophy_of_Prevention
This thread --- on a philosophical question --- is beginning to devolve into a political or religious debate instead of a dispassionate dialog. Some indignant posters seem to be defending canonical positions instead of philosophical postulations. So, since the OP is of interest to me, I'll continue on, while trying to avoid the hostile dug-in posters with polarized worldviews and ad hominem arguments : attacking the messenger instead of responding to the message. Fortunately, there are still a few calm open-minded thinkers on the forum. :cool:
I don't think we need to talk about intentionality, or not yet, or not this way.
Ask yourself how your approach would change if, instead of just saying the path of the billiard ball is a result, you said that the billiard ball is constrained to follow such a path.
If you can get yourself into a Humean frame of mind, and imagine that almost anything could happen when one billiard ball strikes another, then you are ready to see the resulting path as a narrowing of this possibility space, as a possibility left open by the various operative constraints.
And there's a sense in which such a view is frankly statistical, as Hume's was. (Other antecedents would be the ideal gas laws and statistical mechanics, the statistical framework for evolution by natural selection due to Fisher, etc.)
That's how I understand this approach, in broad strokes.
So what is the cause that retards your progress as you try to push through the rush hour traffic constrained by the weight of other cars and all the stop lights? What do you say made you late for work?
How is it that science can measure entropic and viscous forces?
Why is agency just half the story of the world when the other is the frustration of agency that follows from the interaction of agents?
Even if we accept your idiosyncratic framing of causality as agency - an ontology of animism - the logic of systems still applies.
By a country mile, as one would expect.
Non-linearity is generic in nature. Newtonian physics is the special case. Every trajectory in nature is subject to a context of accident and fluctuation, starting with the quantum mechanical and progressing to the emergent constraints that organise turbulent flow and other dissipative structures.
Newtonian physics just hides the irreducible holism of nature. You can see this in the way space and time are the acausal void added by hand. We know of course that they are intimately part of the dynamics.
It also hides in the reaction force of the third law. The impact of the rolling ball on its world is seen as the agential action - the action force. But to make sense of that, to bring in the world that can give such a thing its proper holistic measure, we balance the book-keeping by saying the little momentum vector is matched by another little momentum vector representing the fact that the world pushed back and so closed the system for momentum as the conservation of energy would require.
So if you understand the metaphysics of physics, you can see the games being played with causality so as to model the world in the way that humans find the most practical and convenient.
And you would thus also understand what is being left out or papered over as the larger metaphysical content of our understandings.
The subtlest notion in fundamental physics is gauge theory. It speaks to causal holism in ways you havent even begun to consider.
And what do you know, the Bayesian Brain crowd are now looking to ground their biosemiotic theory of mind on gauge theory. It is all coming together nicely.
On Bayesian mechanics: a physics of and by beliefs
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0029
Time to get hip to the latest trip? Information theory is so 1990s. These guys are the names you want to start dropping and quote-mining to make it sound like you are up with the game.
This is an indication of your faulty way of looking at things. The activity involved is described as pushing through rush hour traffic. The cause of this is the intent to get to work. The end state is described as "late for work". The cause of being late for work is that the person did not find the most efficient way to get there, or did not leave early enough, or something like that. The things which retard your progress are obstacles. Assigning "cause" to the obstacles is simply an attempt to lay the blame for your own mistakes on something else.
Quoting apokrisis
I fully agree with these remarks. Agency is only one part of the story. And, the logic of systems still applies, but it only applies to a different part. Since it takes agency for granted, it cannot be applied toward understanding that other part, agency. So it produces an incomplete understanding. The issue being as I explained already, there is no distinction between the internal boundary and the external boundary. Systems logic doesn't have that accommodation. The problem occurs if someone believes that the logic of systems can produce a complete understanding. This would be a misunderstanding of what systems logic can do.
Take Newton's first law for example. It takes the motion of bodies for granted. This law is extremely useful, and has very wide ranging applicability. However, since it takes motion for granted it cannot be applied toward understanding motion itself, or the cause of motion. Some people might argue that we can apply it toward understanding the cause of motion, because it stipulates that a force is required to alter a body's motion. But that's just a change to motion, and there is no indication as to what a "force" even is, other than just another motion.
Sounds like you've got it all figured-out, while I'm still working-out the bugs in my own little homely theory of causal information. Therefore, I bow to your air of superiority --- as I did obeisance to 180's arrogance before*1. I can't even come close to such a sense of absolute certainty. So I'm not in a position to be condescending. And I'm not engaged in whatever mano e mano game you are playing.
For the record, I'm not really trying to play catch-up with your "hip" expertise. I'm content to just plod along, developing my personal & amateur Information-centric philosophical worldview. It keeps me amused. But I don't take it so seriously that I get offended by alternative perspectives on the world. I can even fit Biosemiotics --- as I superficially understand it --- neatly into the Enformationism thesis. Yet I make no claim to scientific rigor in my non-professional, non-academic retirement hobby. I leave that up to the pros. Hence, on this forum, I'll try to avoid a stare-down with those who are so far above my pay grade, and to limit my dialoging to other un-hip amateur philosophers closer to my own level. :smile:
PS___I see that you are viewing my thesis from the perspective of 1990s Information theory. But I'm incorporating 21st century Information theory into my world model, that you seem to be unaware of, and even disdainful of. That's OK though, I keep myself entertained with feckless Philosophy as a means, not to know-it-all, but to "know thyself".
*1. But I'm an independent-minded vassal, who sometimes mutters under his breath : "E pur si muove"
I get the impression that is not a fan of Agency in any case, especially top-down agency. So, just for you, here's some ideas from a new biological model of Self-Organization that doesn't mention outside Agency specifically, but does repeatedly mention the role of Information. Is "top-down" information a form of agency? If these information-biased excerpts from the article interest you, I'd like to hear your comments. :smile:
Designing Life :
"Synthetic Morphology" (due to intervention of human agents)
"spontaneously organize" (for no apparent reason ???)
"biological forms seem to have inevitable, unique target structures" (pre-programming??)
"they are able to make use of top-down information" (whence ???)
"Where does form come from? What rules has evolution developed for controlling it?" (Form = pre-coded information?)
"How does a featureless blob that is the early embryo know what to make and where to make it?" (formless potential transformed/enformed into cognizable objects)
"Morphogenesis is a subtle process involving the interplay of information at the scales of the whole organism." (some early theories of morphogenesis were rejected as mystical, because the "rules" were unknown, and the key feature was Holism . Yet Alan Turing postulated a mathematical Theory of Pattern Formation, that is now called a theory of Morphogenesis)
"Einstein . . . . what the real determinant of form and organization is seems quite obscure."
"global rules governing form" ( universal Generic Information ???)
"bioelectric signaling" (Biosemiotics??)
"morphological engineering . . . . desired structure" (natural morphology = design ??)
Scientific American magazine, may 2023, by Phillip Ball
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/synthetic-morphology-lets-scientists-create-new-life-forms/
I'm interested in bottom-up agency.
OK. Who or What is the bottom-line Agent/Agency? : Matter, Energy, Evolution, God, First Cause, "Idiosyncratic Causality", John Barrymore, Other?
Agency (philosophy) :
Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment . . . . Agency is contrasted to objects reacting to natural forces involving only unthinking deterministic processes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)
A question that I believe remains unanswered due to the unexplainable effects of biogenesis, although apparently this has primitively emulated in a lab where conditions for life already exist such as humidity, atmospheric prressure etc
That's the issue, we do not properly know the source of this form of agency. But evidence indicates that we ought to accept it as real. So to portray it as nonexistent just because systems theory doesn't provide the means for modeling it, is a mistake.
Unexplained ? unexplainable.
A coy response. But not having empirical knowledge of the cosmic Agent hasn't stopped philosophers from describing its necessary properties, based on rational inference alone. Plato identified his abstract agency in terms of Causation, and Aristotle defined his Prime Actor in terms of Motion, both of which are forms of Change. And yet, such non-human pre-existing Agents are usually imagined as inherently uncaused, unmoved, and changeless ; all negative attributes. But nothing in the known (contingent ; space-time) Real World fits those speculative descriptions. So, anything we might say about the Agent/Agency --- including "real" --- is just an uneducated guess. Care to take a shot in the dark? :smile:
PS___I tend to define my conjectured "form of Agency" in terms of Organization (i.e Information), among other positive attributes : e.g. Enformer. However, since I "do not properly know", no personal characteristics or attributes are presumed.
What the First Cause Is :
Rather, the First Cause is uncaused, beginningless, initially changeless, has libertarian freedom, and is enormously powerful, that is, a transcendent immaterial Creator.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-94403-2_6
Note --- the Kalam argument is based on monotheist presumptions. Which inadvertently makes the First Person responsible for all the good and bad things in the world. Which may be why most monotheists prefer to offload the Evil stuff onto a personal Bad Guy. Ironically, that dualistic gambit seems to deny the mono of Monotheism.
The fact that The Agent (that's what I'll call it for you) cannot be known empirical, does not prevent us from knowing it. That's what's described by Aquinas, as knowing the cause by its effect. This type of knowledge is much more difficult than direct empirical knowledge and subject to a higher degree of fallibility because it relies on empirical knowledge for premises, then goes further through deductive logic. So whereas empirical knowledge may be simple, this knowledge, of the non-empirical,
(what is prior to the empirical as cause of it), requires complex empirical knowledge to proceed logically. Therefore there is more opportunity for error. The common occurrence of this type of knowledge, is the knowledge we get of a person's thoughts, from the person's words, and knowledge of one's intentions, from the person's actions. You can see how this type of knowledge is much more complex than direct empirical knowledge, and has a higher degree of uncertainty.
However, such knowledge need not be "uneducated". We need to proceed only from very strong premises. Here is a starting point. All change, activity in the empirical world requires the passing of time. If no time passed there would be no change. Further analysis of the nature of time, passing from future to past, at the present, and the empirical fact that activity, or change only occurs at the present, reveals that the passing of time is the cause of change, or activity. So we can associate The Agent with the passing of time. To understand the passing of time as non-empirical, yet having an empirical effect (change and activity), is a first step toward understanding how non-empirical causes may have empirical effects.
Yes. That's why, although I lost faith in the bible stories about a father-like Creator, I couldn't deny the reverse logic --- from effect to cause --- that points back to an ultimate Causal Agent of some kind. Until 1931, most scientists apparently assumed that the universe "just-is", with no need for an origin explanation.
Yet, in the early 20th century, pragmatic Astronomers followed the trail of circumstantial red-shift evidence back to a sudden beginning in a mathematical Singularity --- at which the evidence vanishes. When a hunter-tracker, looking for the nest/lair (origin) of his prey, discovers that the trail of tracks suddenly vanishes, he may look up for signs of an eagle to explain the lack of tracks. Or, he can keep searching in the same direction, to see if he can pick-up the trail again.
The Multiverse theory (eternal physical causation) is of the latter kind. Based on the presumption of physical continuity, it assumes that there must be more of the same tracks out there somewhere. Yet, metaphysical Causal Agency theories tend to look-up for some kind of non-empirical Agent to explain the origin of a contingent Reality. Both approaches begin their philosophical search at the transition from empirical evidence to an abyss of Uncertainty. Then, Physicalists fill-in the blanks with hypothetical (presumably real) physical stuff. And Metaphysicalists project (necessarily Ideal) non-physical non-empirical non-stuff into the unknowable void. Or, at least the Potential for real stuff.
Which method is more likely to discover the true origin of Reality? Depends on whether you prefer Real (empirical) Truth or Ideal (logical) Truth. Either way, the search for ultimate truth is, as you say, complicated by the absence of evidence. :smile:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Interesting notion : time (change) without a material substrate to evolve. How would you describe "non-empirical passage of time"? "Eternity" is usually defined as changeless by philosophers. But for religious purposes, Heavenly Eternity has been described as changeable, but never-ending. How would you define "non-empirical" (non-experiential)Time? :cool:
PS___I recently imagined a new way to think of Time in terms of Causal Energy*1. Not exactly "non-empirical" but knowable only by observing its Effects. Could that be a "step" toward "understanding how non-empirical causes may have empirical effects"?
*1. Time is Energy :
Time is merely how we measure the expenditure of Energy in the form of Entropy (negative trends). Since Energy itself is not a sensable phenomenon, we like to think of it, metaphorically, as a river flowing from a mountaintop into the valley. And yet along the way down, we get some value for the expenditure of Time. The cosmic payback is what we call Evolution, in the positive sense of living creatures descending from inert material.
http://bothandblog7.enformationism.info/page63.html
Time is other than change, for a number of reasons. First, change is more specific, particular, it is something becoming different than it was. Time on the other hand is more universal. The very same period of time applies to a vast multitude of different changes. In this way time has become a means for comparing changes. This makes time completely different from change, as something which all changes have in common.
Basically, change is the physical difference that we notice. We do not notice the passing of time, only the physical difference, then we conclude logically that time must have passed. This is because we posit the passing of time as what is required for change. We do this, because we see that all changes have this in common, the passing of time. So whenever we notice that change has occurred, we know that it is necessary that time has passed. But this cannot be reversed. Time can pass with no noticeable physical change. This is evident at time periods shorter than Planck time. A short length of time must pass before change can be noticed. Therefore time is logically prior to physical change. For comparison, "animal" is logically prior to "human being", as something which all human beings have in common, just like all physical change has "time" in common. But we cannot reverse this to say that all time has physical change, just like we cannot say that all animals are human.
Granted. The word "Time" has many shaded meanings, depending on context. But they all seem to refer to discernible Change of some kind. So I was talking about Time as we know it conventionally & empirically (by sensory experience of differences*1 between one observation and another : i.e. Change/Causation*2).
Obviously, only a fraction of the physical changes in the universe are observed or observable (by humans). And philosophers have examined the Epistemology & Ontology of Time from various perspectives : (1) fatalism; (2) reductionism and Platonism with respect to time; (3) the topology of time; (4) McTaggarts argument; (5) the A-theory and the B-theory; (6) presentism, eternalism, and the growing block theory; (7) the 3D/4D debate about persistence; (8) the dynamic and the static theory; (9) the moving spotlight theory; (10) time travel; (11) time and physics and (12) time and rationality*3.
However, only the "Block Time" models involve something "other than change". And Block Time is simply a scientific term for traditional philosophical timeless/changeless Eternity. Are you referring to Events --- if that notion even makes sense in a timeless state of being -- in which nothing changes? In a physical Event, any difference/change is observable in the material form. But, what would constitute a metaphysical temporal Event? I suppose that Fatalism could be construed as a metaphysical concept of Time, in that the predetermined world of the gods, could be interpreted scientifically as a type of expanding Block Time*4.
In Block Time and Eternity theories, a traditional conventional term is used metaphorical & negatively, in order to indicate what Eternity (timelessness) is not. Can you give a positive example of Time that does not involve Change? If so, I may have to modify my essay on Time as Energy/Change, to add : "among other things". :smile:
*1. In my information-based thesis, Time is "the difference that makes a difference" (Bateson on Meaning). If time is "other than Change", does it make any Difference/Meaning to a sentient mind?
"What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continuously transformed are themselves provided with energy." https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/information-difference.html
*2. I suppose our sensory inputs at different points-in-time, would only be static snapshots, without rational (metaphysical) inference to link those instantaneous frames into a continuous movie. So, from that perspective, Time is not physical Change, but a mental construct that we interpret as Change.
*3. Time :
Those like Aristotle and Leibniz, who think that time is not independent of the events that occur in time, deny the existence of absolute time,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
*4. What is the growing block theory of time? :
The growing block theory of time holds that the past and present are real, and the future is unreal. The passage of time comprises new things coming into existence: as the present moves forward, and what was once present becomes past, the 'block' of reality grows.
https://academic.oup.com/mind/article-abstract/128/510/527/4317403?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Note --- The Christian concept of Eternity is not static, but more like a "growing block time", which is a process separated from the laws of Nature in a heavenly realm : outside of Time.
What I meant is causation stops at some point. After that the question becomes metaphysical such as first cause etc.
For if you are to have ten nodes youd need nine and if you wanted a 9 node network youd need 8 etc where is the first node in such a network made metaphysically speaking ?
Yes. In spoken or written language, Ellipsis is the intentional omission of information. But the intention is indicated by a series of dots, or perhaps a smile/smirk after the last word in an incompleted thought : as a clue, meaning "you fill-in the blanks".
In Cosmology, the history of the Self-Organization of the physical universe suddenly stopped at a point in time, where time itself vanished into eternity, defined mathematically as a Singularity. Hence, some cosmologists apparently inferred an ellipsis in the history of our world --- even though there were no physical dots to indicate an intentional omission of information about the provenance of Reality. Not even a "once upon a time". So, they imagined a Metaphysical or Metaphorical gap-filler to allow the story to continue indefinitely into the past.
The inquiring mind seems to know somehow, that logically there should be more to the story. So, Materialists fill-in the pre-history blank with an infinite regression of Multiverses, while Spiritualists infer the logical necessity for an intentional Original Organizer. Which raises the question of what were the "contextual clues" pointing beyond the empirical beginning toward a hypothetical Cause of the known events?
Perhaps, our experience with physical Impetus & Momentum has primed us to look beyond the initial Action for an Actor, responsible for the subsequent patterns of Self-Organization. How else could Time/Change/Evolution just -- suddenly & without warning -- start Ticking/Changing/Organizing for no apparent reason? :smile:
Ellipsis : the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.