The Singularity is an infinite density and temperature that existed ~ 13.8 billion years ago. I had hypothesized that it gave rise to homeostasis as a result of Newton's Third Law of Motion as way of providing a mechanistic basis for that Principle of Physiology since there was precedent for the other two (Schrodinger and Mitchell). I was looking for what may have given rise to homeostasis as a way of explaining why matter exists. There may be 'no need for pre-programmed determination' but I was trying to see what the serial pre-determination approach that got me back to the unicell would predict occurred previously to explain the First Principles of Physiology. So for example, in his book "Emergence Everywhere' Harold Morowitz explains how the electron balances the energy of the proton in a hydrogen atom.....where does that derive from. I took the opportunity to exploit the serial pre-adaptation approach to find the source of that property of physics using the biologic model of evolution. I think that other such properties of physics might similarly be discovered using that approach. With the Best of intentions (WBI), John
Dear JohnWait wait... What is the difference between The Singularity and The Big Bang here?And why would homeostasis - which is temporary and local and certainly not permanent and universal - have anything to do with The Big Bang per se?If anything is the opposite of The Big Bang and "was bound to happen" as its result it would be The Big Crunch or The Big Rip.Matter is energy is information. No need for any pre-programmed determination within The Big Bang for that to be the case.You can just light a fire and observe it to discover that this is the case.BestAlexanderThe way that I got to the question of why those micelles formed in the first place was by extention of the serial pre-adaptation premise I had followed beginning with the lung (my area of expertise and research, so I had a sense of how that 'arc' might have formed). So the question was 'what pre-adaptation would have been the 'template' for the unicell? It seemed that the Singularity was a logical answer, so then I started thinking about the forward progression from the Singularity to the Big Bang, etc, etc. Then the question arose as to why homeostasis came about because I had never thought about or read anywhere about its origins. And it occurred to me that since homeostasis acts to maintain biological systems, and can be thought of in the context of balanced chemical equations, that homeostasis arose as the 'equal and opposite reaction' to the Big Bang, because without such a reaction there would be no matter, only energy. I know that's highly speculative, but my sense is that the biology may offer a model for that hypothetical if in fact it is derivative of the Singularity/Big Bang. With the best of intentions....jstDear JohnYes, I see your (brilliant) point indeed.And since my philosophy starts with the sociont (or "the tribe" as I'm neither an individualist nor a collectivist), the sociont has a far far longer lifespan than a mere (in)dividual.Quick question though: In what way does homeostasis represent the opposite of The Big Bang? I would think The Big Crunch to be the (possible) opposite of The Big Bang.Is homeostasis rather not an emergence coming out of The Big Bang?Best intentionsAlexanderSo my definition of the First Principles of Physiology came out of my reverse-engineering of gas-exchange/lung evolution. Based on the close fit between lipids and oxygenation, from lung surfactant being necessary at birth for survival all the way back to cholesterol in the phospholipid bilayer of the cell membrane in early eukaryotic evolution in vertebrates. The three Principles are negative entropy (stolen from Schrodinger), chemiosmosis (the most primitive form of bioenergy), and homeostasis (as the manifestation of the equal and opposite reaction to the Big Bang, without which there would be no matter in the Cosmos). Honestly, I prefer to base my thoughts on biologic principles on such an experimental reduction in order to avoid teleology/tautology. The answers seem to be 'cleaner' that way. Do libido and mortido apply to all organisms? Libido references reproduction, but I'm not sure that that's as important as epigenetic inheritance, which is contingent on offspring acting as phenotypic agents. But there are organisms like Turitopsis dorneii, a jelly fish, that is thought to be immortal because under stress it reverts to its juvenile phenotype......I think that that's an anthropomorphism because the organism has figured out another way of gaining epigenetic marks from its environment, if you see my point.With the Best of Intentions, JohnWell, John, you would love to hear that our philosophy is actually a dialectics between libido and mortido. Yes, yang and yin as a Freudian cosmology if anything.So in that deeper sense the word will always be out on whether libido or mortido wins. But to the living organism itself is unthinkable that libido will not prevail. That is essentially what "will" is.And for full logical closure we have simply made birth the great trauma which as such must be denied (you can not get back into the womb any more than you can relive the past) which turns into the first and beautiful denial in life. Wanting to die becomes I want to live and libido is the result. Constantly driven by mortido as its motor. Libido as consciousness and mortido as subconsciousness. Freud's death drive (and will to life) put in their proper places.Any chance you can summarize your take on The First Principles of Physiology? Where do you place contingency, ironically the only thing that truly seems necessary.Best intentionsAlexanderI will reply in [brackets] as if we were conversing.....Absolutely, yes!Which is why philosophers are preoccupied with will (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and not with choice (which is a banality except for ethical implications).[Yea, I don't see 'choice' as commensurate with 'fight or flight', for example. And I get the part about choice and ethics]Evolution within an environment of limited resources (such as a planet) will foster will since that which wants to die dies out and that which wants to live makes the effort to survive and becomes more abundant.[Well I go back to my pet hypothesis that there is a set of First Principles of Physiology that set life in motion, like 'ab urbe condita' founding of life. In that sense, the time delay for 'choice' seems inconsistent, if you get my meaning....Will seems in keeping with that sense of existentialism]Psychoanalysis then enriches the philosophy of will into drives and desires and that is where ambiguity and deception (or seduction and manipulation) comes into the picture. You now also successfully see the same thing in non-human nature too. Makes perfect sense.[I think that Consciousness is pervasive among living organisms. Helmut Platner studies paramecia. In one of his papers he shows that if you put a drop of glucose in the water, the paramecium will go towards the sugar, it's calcium fluxes increasing within it just like a calcium flux would when I see 'sugar'. Consciousness is the organification of Cosmology, and all life complies with that Principle of Principles IMHO. A paramecium doesn't have to know that it knows- that's left to us, and we shouldn't abuse the privilege. The paramecium's consciousness is suited for its Niche, but don't think less of it...sounds to me like Wm Blake's 'The Lamb'The Lamb
Little Lamb who made theeDost thou know who made theeGave thee life & bid thee feed.By the stream & o'er the mead;Gave thee clothing of delight,Softest clothing wooly bright;Gave thee such a tender voice,Making all the vales rejoice!Little Lamb who made theeDost thou know who made theeLittle Lamb I'll tell thee,Little Lamb I'll tell thee!He is called by thy name,For he calls himself a Lamb:He is meek & he is mild,He became a little child:I a child & thou a lamb,We are called by his name.Little Lamb God bless thee.Little Lamb God bless thee.But paramecium instead of lamb, and Nature instead of God.....]We even work with instinct (the animalistic), drive (the mechanical), desire (the human) and transcendence (the sacred) in our work in what we call a dialectics of libido and mortido (essentially a psychoanalytical approach to yang and yin).[And I think that those aspects of our psyche are clearer once you strip away the 'deceptions' that we've formulated to cope with our ambiguous existence]But freedom has very little or nothing to do with this. Awareness does though. So psychoanalysis works only with awareness and never with freedom.[I've come to a different conclusion, based on the homologies between Quantum Mechanics and The First Principles of Physiology. In that frame, both the physics and the physiology are both deterministic and probabilistic, and it's the latter that confers 'freedom'. I think that aspect of our being comes into play as we evolve away from David Bohm's Explicate Order (closer to the ambiguity) towards the Implicate Order ('Truth'), which is what science provides us, if we have the Will to do so. In my own case, 50 years of chasing my intellectual tail led me to this sentence through science. So for example, I think we have to 'control' an experiment because we intuitively understand what Bohm says about our subjective senses filtering out the Implicate Order....if we were to exist in the Implicate Order, we wouldn't have to control experiments, if that makes sense. I deliberately chose science over philosophy because I wanted to have the opportunity to test ideas using technology, rather than making stuff up whole cloth, which seems rather self-servingly narcissistic. But here I am, 50 years hence, philosophizing! But with the 'lens' of my science to guide me to you and have this discussion.... I personally think I am closer to the Implicate as a result of that experience...do you?]Freedom stays with choice but has no role connected to will, unless you still base your idea of justice on Christian moralism and good versus evil. I don't. I'm definitely beyond and evil. Out ethics is an existential approach to smartness versus stupidity, prolonging and extending libido over mortido since mortido finally wins anyway (death). We like survival, not immortality.[I assume that all of the above is the consequence of cellular cooperativity. In the battle between bacteria and us, when the prokaryotes devised biofilms and Quorum Sensing, pseudo-multicellular traits, our forebears the eukaryotes copes by cooperating with one another, to this day. So good/evil are manifestations of that cooperativity that has allowed us to exist and florish....it's in our DNA. The 'evil' of doing otherwise has largely been winnowed down to a few bad players like Ebola and Hitler, but in IMHO they are outliers that will be dealt with by the prevailing understanding that cooperation with one another and with the environment are necessary. Unless we cave in to our narcissistic ways and follow the hawkers of AI and CRISPR, in which case I firmly believe we are screwed because that's not how we got to this stage of evolution. As I said in the 'Central Theory of Biology' paper (see attached), it was the selection pressure for adaptation to land, evolving lungs from swim bladders as a derivative of skeletal calcification by Parathyroid Hormone-related Protein that set the wheels of endothermy in motion. The upshot was bipedalism, freeing the forelimbs for flight in birds and tool making and texting in hominins. That, in turn put selection pressure on the CNS to further evolve in order to coordinate all of the new fangled special effects derivative of standing up-right and chucking spears (to cut to the chase). But that also entailed the neuroticism that we are burdened with, IMHO. When I wrote that Central Theory paper the thing that compelled me to publish it was the realization that meditation is the flip side of endothermy, etc etc. And when I extrapolate from meditation, I can 'see' why body temperature drops as a 'reverse evolution', and that perhaps we become more in touch with our gut-brain, which was the pre-adaptation of the brain-brain (see Nicholas Holland's paper on the skin-brain if you care to (Holland ND. Early central nervous system evolution: an era of skin brains? Nat Rev Neurosci. 2003 Aug;4(8):617-27.) and btw, the interrelationship between skin and brain is why, for example, all neurodegenerative diseases have skin homologues. These insights to skin as the source of all physiologic traits as the homologue of the cell membrane was the impetus for "Evolution, the Logic of Biology" (see attached).[And I don't think that mortido 'wins out'. That's how we see the life cycle from the perspective of the adult phenotype as the be-all and end-all. But from the epigenetic inheritance perspective, it is the zygote that is the primary selection pressure, generating offspring to collect epigenetic marks, which are brought back to the parent organism by the 'phenotype as agent', the epigenetic marks changing the DNA of the egg and sperm, aided by meiosis for the selection of marks relevant to the 'history' of the organism, modifying the development of the embryo to detect the future (changed) environment accordingly in order to survive and thrive. That on-going productive relationship between the organism and its environment is our immortality. Moreover, our microbiome may also be immortal in the sense that when we die it returns to the ground, enters the aquafer, is assimilated by plants and animals and is thus passed on to other organisms within our respective ecosystems. BTW, there is evidence that our microbiome remains intact after we are buried...it's called the necrobiome. This way of thinking about means and ends is, IMHO, helpful because it acts as a foil to the prevailing attitude in society that we recognize our mortality, and the fear of death compels us to engulf our surroundings in order to be 'too big to fail'....facetiousness notwithstanding. And of course that's fueled by the Physicists telling us that we're only here by chance based on Anthropic Principle, when in reality we are not 'in' this place, we are 'of' this place, literally. So instead of the Big Chill, it should be the Big Thrill! If only...... ]I'll stop so you can respond, if you wish....Absolutely, yes!Which is why philosophers are preoccupied with will (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) and not with choice (which is a banality except for ethical implications).Evolution within an environment of limited resources (such as a planet) will foster will since that which wants to die dies out and that which wants to live makes the effort to survive and becomes more abundant.Psychoanalysis then enriches the philosophy of will into drives and desires and that is where ambiguity and deception (or seduction and manipulation) comes into the picture. You now also successfully see the same thing in non-human nature too. Makes perfect sense.We even work with instinct (the animalistic), drive (the mechanical), desire (the human) and transcendence (the sacred) in our work in what we call a dialectics of libido and mortido (essentially a psychoanalytical approach to yang and yin). But freedom has very little or nothing to do with this. Awareness does though. So psychoanalysis works only with awareness and never with freedom.Freedom stays with choice but has no role connected to will, unless you still base your idea of justice on Christian moralism and good versus evil. I don't. I'm definitely beyond and evil. Out ethics is an existential approach to smartness versus stupidity, prolonging and extending libido over mortido since mortido finally wins anyway (death). We like survival, not immortality.Best intentionsAlexanderI understand the argument/logic. But with all due respect, my concern is that by starting after the fact with cultural norms and practices, the ontology and epistemology of 'Free Will' gets distorted by the fact that life exists within the boundaries of ambiguity and deception, as I have expressed the human condition from my perspective as a scientist. That is to say, there are homologies between Quantum Mechanics and The First Principles of Physiology, perhaps the most significant being the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which assigns the 4 variables for electron spin. The first three are deterministic, whereas the fourth is probabilistic. In that sense, there are 'degrees of freedom', so is that Will or Choice? For me, Will connotes a force of nature that is more consistent with physics than Choice does.Your thoughts?Yes!Will is will. Or rather will is libido (the will to live in Latin) and its opposite is mortido (the will to will nothing, or the will to live as if dead).But we are not free from this will and this will can not un-will itself. So the whole concept of "free will" was just logical nonsense from the very beginning.But it has served the Abrahamic religions well since each person can be accused of willing freedom too much instead of willing submission.So it is a religio-judicial concept to be able to judge people both for intentions and behaviors.But choice can certainly be free which is why what we do and its consequences become an integrated part of our self-identity. Flashes of self-moments in different near-worlds chained together to constitute our historicized selves.So we should speak of free choice and not of free will.BestAlexanderBrilliantly articulated, Alexander. The more I learn of your language system and vision the more I am loving it and seeing its beauty and depth.
Re Free Will, clearly no philosophically libertarian free will for me. But there is a self-consciousness system that regulates and legitimizes choices that I identify as my “named personhood,” i.e., “Gregg decided to reply to this email, because he deemed it justifiable.”
With warmth,
G
From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Alexander Bard
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2019 12:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Matter, Life, Mind, Culture, Meta-Culture (was: The Inner Senses of the Human Psyche)
Dear Gregg
My approach was to go back and check when factuality actually served a purpose in language (language was certainly more poetry, power and manipulation than factuallty at first (yes "shit-testing"is way older and much more widespread than "fact-checking"). And there are two areas where factuality has a value that gives it an excuse to require its extra needed energy and effort, and those areas are the social orientation through an unknown landscape (hunting and warfare being the two most obvious) plus as the wisdom of the elders (what is a rite of passage in front on the elders if not one huge goodbye to childhood fantasies and fairytales and a brutal existential acceptance of hardcore reality).
The proper justification of values must then develop from either of these two sources, certainly not from fantasies and fairytales (as today's confused and paranoid social justice warriors with their narcissistic over-emotionality claim). The right values are then simply the offspring of fully understanding factuality and its value and then allowing for humanness and not perfection to color that understanding (otherwise all laws would be zero tolerance, and death penalties galore whenever that zero tolerance is broken, like a North Korean Platonism). As for digital I call such a development of ethics "the ethics of interactivity" and refer to it back as life-stage development application toward "a contributive role with an existential experience" within "the sociont" (or the original nomadic tribe in all its contemporary expressions). Meaning I add "strategy" to your call for a "wisdom" of "ethics".
Needless to add perhaps, there is no Christian-style "free will" in our model. But why should there be? Freedom and will have after all nothing to do with each other (unless you desperately want to keep a balancing karma or judgment day in your moralism). But there are choices recognized as such. Which means the sociont can agree on policies that with some creative plasticity fosters the sociont in certain directions (like makes it move as a whole when food is scarce or enemies get closer). Values built on human archetypes and the communication in between them. There you go, the ethics if interactivity can then both "make socio-biological sense" to people and also be applicable on an increasingly digital future. But forget about pacifism if you go for it.
Best intentions
Alexander
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