Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

I think this is a pretty good account, but it involves creating one of the strangest metaphysical objects ever conceived. For starters, if all causation is actually mediated by the logos spermatikos, then maybe nothing really ever touches anything else? Then how do you explain things like wine mixing with water? (The ancient stoics have a lot of metaphysics about wine mixing with water.)

Anywho, another solution to the problem of "how models work" is to say that logic can cause things.

And then you can say that humans can interact with logic in a way that lets us create models that are in some way aligned with the essential, logical character of a physical process.

But then you have this strange question about how logic can work as a go-between for both the moons of Saturn and the water-clock.

The ancient stoics identified this with the "logos spermatikos." They described each object in each instant of the universe as carried forward and mediated in its relations by logic.

And so there's something that's just internally harmonious about a physical process and a pen-and-paper model. But this kind of beggars belief, doesn't it? To say that if the workings of a water-clock can tell an astronomer something about the moons of Saturn, there must be something subtle in common between the moons of Saturn and the water-clock?

Logic, naturally, should be your real recourse. You should assert that the natural world progresses in accordance with fundamental logic.

Here's an example of the kind of problem Peirce was responding to. Let's say you want to understand a physical process, & so you make a little model of it. Then you interact with the model. Based on that model you get a prediction about physical reality, which you then test, and it turns out to be right. Now how does a world of purely efficient causation explain what just happened there?

On the one hand, you can say that the subtle workings of your model are aligned with the physical process...

At this point I want to move on but it's really difficult to choose a starting point for Peirce.

How about this? Peirce was an incredibly well-read person who was both a working scientist and deeply familiar with scholasticism. So he was on-board with evolution, modern astronomy, etc. He had no guff with the explanatory power of efficient causation in modern science. But he was also thinking about the big-picture of how something like logic interacts with the world of efficient causation.

I also want to warn about a mis-impression, before I start to build on this concept, that contemporary intelligent-design types are also all about efficient (not final) causation.

When intelligent design people advocate for the deity having some grand plan to reach goal X, they very directly talk about how the deity put things in motion and set up a plan from the origin.

Contrast this with final causation, which proposes things like "boat races cause sailboats to be built."

Now in the period after Descartes, we almost exclusively define causation as "efficient," meaning that the thing that physically impacts, touches, compels, etc is the cause. For example, fish bite fishhooks because bait causes appetizing sensations in fish, appetizing sensations in fish cause eating behaviors, and eating behaviors include biting. The universe of efficient causation is just a big machine of force compelling compelling matter and so on.

By contrast, some areas of math seem pretty darn convergent.

For Aristotelian scholastics, it used to be much easier to imagine that history was convergent because Aristotle described one of the 4 forms of causation as "final," meaning goal-oriented. To illustrate: when you solve a puzzle (correctly) you are working towards a preordained solution akin to final causation. Or in other terms, the puzzle-maker has caused YOU to make certain actions in pursuit of your goal. Convergence.

Let me tie two threads together that I've made recently regarding cognitive diversity and hypermedia.

I want to introduce an idea to you from the semiotic theory of CS Peirce: the "finious" cause.

I think the best way to introduce this is to ask you to think about convergence and divergence. The Big Bang suggests that we live in a (at least partially) astronomical reality. Natural suggestion seems to have a mix of divergent and convergent evolution (see wings for example)...

We are wandering into a wilderness of mirrors erected by a blind LLM and funded by an advertising algorithm.

Both Qan*n and AI porn are the type of hypermedia that will increasingly define public and private lives in the developed world.
As sarsaparilla and pool halls compare to crack and heroin, so too do these hypermedia compare to the hypermedia of the future.
More and more hours of our conscious attention will be consumed by spectacular visions that give us both our reasons to live as well as the secret shames that haunt the subconscious.

(And now we wait for me to get nerdsniped by the millions of people more knowledgeable than me about Egypt, Athens, Plato, archaeology...)

Per my understanding, the Phoenicians kept pataikos lashed to the front of their triremes.

So, and I'm just spitballing here, what if Plato heard about "Patai" from Herodotus (or people informed by H), he heard about "Pataikos" as associated with the Phoenicians and their legendary expeditions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and what if Plato just decided to make an association between the two?

To be plain, I'm suggesting that Plato made Atlantis by remixing Memphis and Phoenicians.

The thing I really want to highlight here is Ptah, a creator-god and craftsman-god worshipped at Memphis. I think this strongly parallels the emphasis on industry and metallurgy that Plato describes in Atlantis.

Now a funny little thing about Ptah is that the workers at Memphis apparently wore lil' eggs as protective totems, & Herodotus names these "pataikos" after the statue of Ptah at Memphis.

You know who else used these??? THE PHONECIANS.

With Herodotus, we have an orator who was in the right place at the right time (the Olympics), talking about such things as the history of Memphis.

It is at Memphis, in Herodotus' Histories, that we get to a lot of the characterizations of Atlantis that a lot of us know: that it was ancient; it was a city of monuments built in devotion to a god of craft (Ptah in H; Hephaestus in Plato), it was destroyed by flooding (or nearly... the dams of Memphis are part of H's account).

So with that out of the way, I want to say that one of the things that really cooks my noodle is the Egyptian frame narrative in Timaeus. Without much justification, this frame narrative is really intrusive and distracting. There's a lot of layers of re-narration and a lot of text that expresses the Egyptians lording over the Athenians, both of which are uncharacteristic for Plato's dialogues.

To cut to the chase, I think that this is obfuscation about Plato's real source, Herodotus.

OK here's some pointless ramblings about Plato's sources for the Atlantis myth.

To be clear from the outset, I think Atlantis is very obviously a myth that is very obviously supposed to suggest something like a critique of Athens' political economy in the period after the Battle of Marathon.

With that aside, I think it's also obvious that Plato didn't invent the idea from whole-cloth, but acted much like a SF author and remixed and hyperbolized characteristics of his surrounding world.

8. Other ethical and social imperatives are basically a boring-ass defense of pluralist Deweyite Creative Democracy and related projects that orbit that overall goal.

6. The gatekeeping of who/what has conscious experience is not terribly interesting or generative.

7. The "infinite game" instead suggests that we should focus on forms of play that are going to help us integrate and benefit from the novelty and surprise generated from atypical symbol-users (including AI). Let's see what they have to offer to others, meaning in this case what others can integrate and develop further.

4. There are lots of atypical brains that have managed to put experience together in ways that are very much unlike Daniel Dennett's or my own.

5. Even if there were a strong qualitative basis for asserting neurotypical norms (IE if we could strongly say that some brain-types are "better"), it still would probably be bad in policy. Instead, we should probably treat neurodiversity as one of the basic protected types in ethical and epistemic pluralism, if not more basic than EG race or religion.