Ethics and cosmology
GHCDT
G / incompleteness
H/ uncertainty
C / underdetermination
D / evolution
T / path-dependence
Is consciousness fundamentally a representation of the world, or is it the felt activity of an organism trying to remain viable within a world of affordances?
Not a representation. We directly perceive action potentials – affordances – in no sense blank objects – but instead ‘cathected’ morphisms in the category C of permitted trajectories – thus bringing actuality out of the world of possibility – phase space realized (but also sedimented) into action.
Philosophy? LW once suggested that the philosopher is sick and the Investigations is the cure. My version is harder. There is no exit. If philosophy is the disease but also the exemplary condition of thinking as such, then LW is of course performing the sickness while diagnosing it. This is not a failure of method, but the only honest form the method could take. Of course LW can’t step outside what he is describing, because there is no ‘outside’ for any of us. We live in the ‘inside.’
Cavell argued that the Investigations is not a victory over skepticism but a way of learning to live with it – the step to acknowledgment rather than an attempted refutation.
We are looking at the difficult proposition of reconciliation with an ‘unclosable’ condition.
Returning to Einstein, I think about his kinship-extension idea – his status-quo-blindness idea – which links his peculiar ‘ethics’ to fellow-feeling – to nonconformity – to thoughtful discernment – he mentions that his cosmic religious feeling has no ethical content. His sense of the cosmos is “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law” – close to Spinoza, to Galileo, to Newton. Ethics he says is a purely human concern needing no religious sanction at all.
The ancients conflated cosmology and ethics. This is the unity of the virtues argument.
These are simply two things that happen to coexist in the same man, one supplying awe, the other obligation, without much traffic between them …the unity of character is an ideal – not an expectation.
It would appear that self-exculpation and metaphor-reification are the same fallacy, wearing different clothes. In physics, unearned objectivity turns a heuristic into a false claim about the world. In ethics, unearned objectivity turns a sedimented choice-history into a false claim about the self.
In physics, this is a fluctuation mistaken for a constant.
In ethics, this is an I that turns itself into an it.
It: (the fault, the habit, the attractor) acted.
Better: I acted, historically, and I am still acting now by maintaining the attractor.
Principle: whenever a description shifts a participant-sourced pattern into third-person, mechanism-grammar, ask who benefits from the shift and whether it’s earned.
In physics the check is “does this survive translation into theorems making empirical claims?”
If every authored self-description mixes participant and mechanistic vocabularies, then a sentence like “I couldn’t help it, the habit took over” is doing overextension-of-metaphor work. This is describing sedimented D-content (which was, historically, participant-owned) in third-person, mechanism-flavored registers. You did it – and then disowned doing it.
This is ‘as if” habit were an external field acting on a passive object, rather than a summing up of one’s own accumulated choices. After all: they’re your habits.
The tactic that would excuse the akratic person is structurally identical to the tactic that allows my invention of ‘spacetime memory’ to become a physical claim – instead of staying with the evidence – or staying in the aporia. This is precisely what the akratic person does not do.
Principles:
1. Relations over substances. Reality is a structure of relations. Reality is morphisms, couplings, transformations – rather than in the objects being related. This shows up as coupling ontology in GHCDT and as “reality resides in the composability of morphisms, not in the objects.” Substance is an artifact of not yet having the right relational description.
2. History and path-dependence. Nothing is retrospectively fully caught up. The T-operator never fully catching D, gravity’s plasticity vs. the other forces’ elasticity, lambda as retrospective integration lagging an ever-growing domain – this is the same shape as the akratic-agent material: the sedimented past runs ahead of present reflection, and moral/physical “catching up” is always structurally incomplete rather than merely a temporary gap.
3. Suspicion of unexamined global primitives. The ‘no outside’ thesis, the critique of lambda as assuming a definite integral over a unified cosmic whole, the change to sub specie momentus over sub specie aeternitatis, the flat-space assumption hidden in honor/grievance culture. Apparent paradoxes dissolve once a smuggled-in global/universal frame is replaced with local data plus obstruction classes.
4. Careful policing of the boundary between what’s formally forced and what’s merely available. The physics-demanded/physics-permitted distinction means a methodological commitment to not letting elegant phrasing paper over a logical gap.
5. Agency as structurally dual-timescale, and non-exculpatory. Fast/slow variable, S1/S2, D/T — but paired with the Aristotle/Sartre line that the so-called sedimented autopilot self is still self-authored. The structural account of akrasia is no sense an excuse.
6. Spend your own coin. The closing compression - competence, continued learning, and owning one’s own agency – reads as the practical ethical principle the whole structural apparatus is ultimately in service of.
Paradox:
#2's built-in incompleteness // #6's demand for owned agency
~ taking on responsibility when one has none
The human operator / the retrospective read / the T operator
The characteristic of philosophy to look back on itself
The distinguishing mark being the capacity to take a downstream, compensating action rather than merely continuing along the geodesic
The stone has D (it’s simply subject to the process, following the curve it’s handed)
The stone has no T (no retrospective read of its own trajectory, hence nothing to act on)
The human has both
D carries you along the inherited curvature
T is the operation of reading that trajectory back to yourself, which is the precondition for any subsequent action that isn’t just more of the same curve playing out.
AGENCY is not “not being subject to curvature” – nobody escapes that – it’s closing the loop from D to T to a new action that feeds back into D.
A stone can’t do that – even in principle.
A human can fail to do it (akratic continuation — from Aristotle’s enkrates/akrates distinction: the akratic person has roughly T-capacity yet doesn’t exercise it – this is just sedimented D running on)
Thymos then – to zero in on the most difficult of the Greek emotion-kernels – is not a morphism (a form of relationship to a base) or even a natural transformation (a mapping of one functor to another preserving the internal structure and relationships of the categories) – it is – in GHCDT vocabulary – an obstruction class.
This is the concept: replace the global primitive with “local data plus obstruction classes”
For thymos the global primitive would be something like “role-relations compose smoothly, full stop” –
a naive assumption of a symmetric, always-closing system. Enraged thymos objects to the assumption of non-flat ethical space. This is the dynamic engulfing my country.
Thymos is the local obstruction that shows up exactly where that global assumption fails: it’s the residue one detects when one tries to glue two morphisms together and they won’t glue.
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(1) Refuse the global primitive in favor of (2) local structure plus a record of where it breaks off and (3) stay in the aporia – we have no Archimedean point outside the world to complete our understanding – we have only a Socratic point inside the world – to go on seeking understanding
Socrates points us to a goal of perfected moral integrity – supreme ‘humanness’ approaching divinity …
When you take responsibility where you have none, you initiate a state change – a new transition rule –
the system changes – but then you have to look at it.
Socrates: Are you finished? Have you completed your understanding? Can any of us say this?
Nietzsche: If we subtract the doctrine from the writer, what we have left is the personality. Socrates is one. This is a value unlike any other – absolutely unique – this person. Looking back on history, we might seek doctrines – but if we look for people, we will discover our source of value – look for the individual, the personality, this particular happen-to-be-here sensibility machine XYZ -- look for these exemplars and practice empowering oneself – the thinker thinking the thought – freeing thought – making it capable of taking on responsibility where there is none
