It is always "possible" to posit some kind of hidden machinery in this fashion. And so science doesn't try to prove something is not the case. Instead...
Why propose these pussy half measures? Surely the logic of your position demands that all sentience should be ended immediately by any means necessary...
Yes. We observe effects and impute their causes. We can note some change in the world, and then we can construct an explanatory model of what could ha...
This comes together in any holistic perspective, like Tao, Hegelianism or Peirceanism. You have the three things of an action, its negation, and then ...
That misses the point that words have the power to lift thought beyond such embodied reactions and into what we call a rational level of semiosis or s...
This is the feature and not the bug. It is the arbitrariness of a symbol that allows it to be the signifier of any state of interpretance. It is how t...
Paramecia and worms are responding out of reflex - a genetic hardwired circuit, so a third level even below attention and habit. Humans also have refl...
I wouldn’t agree that habit level processes are unconscious and thus that only attentional processing is conscious. When driving on automatic pilot, y...
It is more complicated. But as a general principle, yes. Your brain tries to do everything at the level of subconscious habit. And then by default, th...
As I say, I can't remember Deacon saying anything surprising so far as biosemiosis went. But the way I view this is to stress that semiosis depends on...
In maths, zero doesn't stand for the void. It is the additive identity element - just as 1 is the multiplicative identity. Anything plus 0 is unchange...
I can't remember the detail of his position - his book came out 10 years ago. But to the degree he understands biosemiosis, the critical difference is...
What point is Deacon trying to make in regard to "absentials"? As with Pattee, Bateson, Peirce and many others who speak for a biosemiotic approach, t...
Not sure what you are arguing precisely but I would talk about top-down constraints more than top-down causation to emphasise that this is about a reg...
From my time in mind science, this is a reason I came to dislike the use of the term. Emergence is invoked in the sense that "something pops out" as t...
I would see boulders as part of a fractal entropic flow. Every boulder is on its way - over eons - to being crumbled into fine sand. And every boulder...
The problem is that "viewer" already implies a passive notion of consciousness - the classic Cartesian mistake. So it builds in the conclusion that th...
It's just a model. That is stated up front. And models are about frames and their events - some set of laws and some collection of components. So sure...
This is just an optimal cognitive strategy. We employ counterfactual reasoning - if not 'yes', then necessarily 'no' - to extract the most possible in...
As some one who defends a pansemiotic ontology, I would point out how a brutely physical level of reality would be organised by the failure to care, o...
Is that different from what I said? Sure. My point is that this is something that has to develop. Every newborn has to go through the process of disco...
Just because you keep repeating that claim doesn't make it true. So far you have neither demonstrated that your conception of Nothingness is actually ...
That is just a formula you keep repeating to duck the points I've made. You have yet to justify it as a reasonable position to take - a priori, or oth...
Well what are you giving as the proper interpretation of what you had in mind? What's your argument for a priori reasoning being exempt from empirical...
There is of course a central unresolved tension in quantum theory - the issue of wavefunction collapse. The maths works beautifully right up until the...
Maybe what folk mean here is that quantum theory can't be understood in classical terms? There is no point banging your head against that particular w...
Yup. It is by understanding how knowledge is an embodied process that we can start to imagine how to turn it into a disembodied one. We can move from ...
My argument is that we have to start from where we are as the thing we are certain about. So if we are certain that there is no such thing as an empty...
Exactly. If you wind back quantum theory all the way back to the beginning, you still arrive at something rather than nothing. Indeed you arrive at th...
My point was that this is too simplistic. A fully relational view of knowledge makes the psychological observation that the "we" who observes is a con...
Rather than something from nothing, or something from something, the third option is something from everything. The Universe could have emerged as a g...
But what if we use this "psychological" fact as the stepping stone to the larger metaphysical picture? So your argument is that the "truth of reality"...
That's a misrepresentation. The brain is not doing maths at all. It is trying to predict its "sensory inputs". It is saying things like that flower sh...
You mention pragmatism. But maybe Peircean pragmatism leads somewhere truly radical because it says our "reality" lies all curled up inside its own "a...
What was at the back of my mind here was the loop quantum gravity (LQG) picture of particles as knots or braided structures in a spacetime "spin netwo...
Yeah. I kind of gave up as soon as I started. So much that has to be unpacked here. :grin: But it is a good thread topic. The underlying metaphysical ...
Charge is to do with the way a particle spins, or rather its helicity - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(physics) So the difference betwee...
It is worth noting how the internet is actually all about the dialectic of connection and memory. So TCP/IP is half the story. The other half is havin...
If you can’t rule it out, then you need to provide your reasons. It is a scientific claim. So it is either supported by the evidence or not. Oh, if on...
Sure. I understand that. What I questioned was the implication it could have a useful impact on the problems of peak fossil fuel and global warming. A...
Is your argument that we just have to wait for depopulation to reduce the overall pressure on energy consumption and environmental degradation? That w...
Good reply. The curious thing is that @"JerseyFlight" says his perspective is Hegelian. But the Hegelian view of history was that it was a journey of ...
The problem is that oil could sustain a global capitalism because it is so energy dense and transportable. Renewables are local energy creation and ma...
No. It is simply that you are discussing something else. Your peer to peer angle is talking about the blank canvas before the structure self organises...
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